Tips from the Founder of the Global Financial Planning Institute with Ashley Murphy | TNN74

Allen  

Hello, and welcome to The New Nomad podcast. I have Ashley Murphy joining me today, somebody who can really help us figure out some of our financial planning needs when we move across borders. He’s somebody who’s creating something new – Global Financial Planning Institute, which I think is opening people’s eyes to many of the issues when you cross borders, but also, he’s somebody who has moved from the United States to Australia. He’s got a great working knowledge of that and we do get a lot of questions. And we’ve not had anybody yet, as a guest in our 70+ episodes, that actually has moved to Australia. We’ve got people from Croatia, and people from Portugal and many other of the digital nomad countries. But today, we’re gonna have something a little bit different. And I’d like to invite my friend Ashley Murphy, who I’ve worked with before. And Ashley, kind of kicking things off. This podcast is a little bit of a travelogue. Maybe if you could share a little bit of your story of, hey, you were somebody, I guess in Minnesota, and now you are in Australia and some of the exciting changes that come with that type of transition? 

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Ashley  

Yeah. Wow, Allen? Well, it’s firstly, it’s a pleasure to be here so thank you very much for the invitation. You said something I just wanted to mention. It’s so funny that you haven’t had someone from Australia because according to the Sydney Morning Herald, and I don’t know if that means a whole lot. But according to the Sydney Morning Herald, in an article in 2016, they said that Australia is the only country in the world that has more Americans moving to it than the other way around for permanent relocation. So more Americans move to Australia than Australians moved to America for permanent relocation. Like I said, take that with a grain of salt, it’s just a local newspaper. You know, before I moved to the US, or I should say, before I moved to Australia, I moved to the US. So that’s where the story originally began. My mother was American. So weirdly, I’ve been an American from birth. So a lot of folks asked me about what was my pathway to citizenship, and how did that happen, what visa was I on I’m like, I don’t know anything about that, or at least, I didn’t natively from my experience but I didn’t know anything about it. So turns out, I was actually an American citizen, before anything else because that carried forward, I was born in the UK, to an Australian father, American mother, then move back to Australia. Six months later, apparently, or not even six months, two months later, six months after I was born, they changed the laws in the UK, so that if you were merely born there, as it still exists in the US if you’re merely born in the UK, then you are a UK citizen. So I’ve got the UK, the US and then lastly, Australia, so tri-citizen. Which really set me up to worry or wonder about, you know, cross border financial planning from birth really didn’t have much, of course to manage or worry about at that time. But thankfully, it’s been a fruitful couple decades. So things are looking good. Now, with your question to do with the move from Minnesota, did you want me to talk about what happened there?

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Allen  

Yeah, that was very interesting, because we do have a lot of folks that are like, always love these transitions. You know, and we’ve known a lot about the digital nomad visas, and we’ve covered a lot of those countries. But is Australia a hard place that in your experience for somebody to move to if they wanted to?

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Ashley  

It is, it really is. And again, it’s one of those things where I don’t know that really firsthand because as a citizen, that hasn’t been an issue. But Australian immigration is somewhat of a mystery to me. I mean, it really boggles my mind. I think what they did was starting around 20-ish years ago, they identified education as being a great, quote, unquote, you know, export industry. And what they may or may not have realized, I don’t know how conscious the decision making was, but they said, Gosh, if we open up hundreds of thousands of college places for people to come, we can sell, you know, billions of dollars of education. But it turns out the students coming from India and China, they weren’t only coming for the education, they wanted to move, so they expanded visa quotas. And so once people had finished their education in Australia, they could stay and so there’s been a lot of that, anyway, um, maybe not answering your questions directly as I could. They’re very intentional about their immigration program here. So if you belong to a certain occupation class, hey, you’re welcomed in. If you get married to an Austalian going the quote unquote Green Card route that I’m calling a green card here, but permanent residents, same thing. You can do that, but it’s expensive. Australia’s, I don’t think this is anything to be proud of, at all, I think it’s a disgrace to be honest. But maybe I shouldn’t use such powerful language because maybe someone could change my mind about it. But it’s almost like a wealth tax that they impose. It’s not an actual wealth tax, it’s just an application fee. But my wife who was not an Australian permanent resident, guess how much the application fee is just for her to apply and produce, you know, an old fashioned phone book worth of documentation of guess what it is to apply? And it’s practically guaranteed that you’ll get it. But the application fee is Allen, how much?

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Allen  

Well, I know some countries out there, you can almost buy citizenship for 100,000 or $200,000. So maybe the fee leads into that. I’ll say $20,000.

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Ashley  

It’s 8300 Australian dollars. And that’s why it’s just the processing fee, and you’re practically guaranteed to get it but of course, you need to be married to an Aussie in the first place. In the US the fee, I think is $500 or something, it’s nothing compared to what it is here. So it’s interesting, it’s not easy to come and stay in Australia, unless you’re in one of those occupation categories.

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Allen  

And many of the people that listen to this podcast are slow travelers. So maybe they’ll stay for a month, three months. But we have a lot of folks that are retiring cross border, they’re taking their wealth with them. Going for a year, two years, three years in different places. I know you with the Global Financial Planning Institute have been teaching a masterclass on practical considerations, working across international borders, etc. Maybe share a little bit of that, because I think this is a really interesting area. And I think also not enough financial planners or people of means take enough time to really talk to a financial planner and say, What does this mean to me if I move to Mexico, or Australia or Portugal, right, or any place that you might choose?

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Ashley  

Yeah, I think the market is divided into three. And this is all financial planning services, I think you’ve got a third that will do nothing, they’re just not going to engage with a plan. And no matter what, they’re probably not going to do anything at all, and they’re not gonna do any planning. Then you’ve got a third that is a do-it-yourselfer. Just because I don’t know, for whatever reason, like Oh, I could do this myself, and you could represent yourself in court, you can do your own taxes, right. So I kind of do my own financial planning, just really a function of how much you value your time and what you enjoy doing. And then there’s the other third that would work with a financial planner. 

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When it comes to international cross border, I mean, it is a relatively new thing. And I moved to the US in 2005, I already had some international assets and income and complications going on. And I went around looking for an adviser or a book, or a group or a website, something that was dealing with these issues, and not from an angle of trying to sell me on an offshore trust or an offshore bank, you know, just some leery government, anti-government, like people aren’t going to text me and I’m sure it’s just not that kind of angle. Just legitimate straight up. I want to live in the first world, you know, I’ll pay my fair share of taxes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said tax is the price you pay for civilization. So I’m fine with that. But what I found is there was nothing. For the first couple of years, it was in the US I worked in corporate finance. So cut my teeth doing company budgets and forecasts eventually, the career choice was made for me courtesy of the great recession. And I found myself turfed out of a VISA credit card company back in early 2009 that contract came to an end. And I thought, well, you know, what am I going to do next? And that was when I went down the road of becoming a financial planner. So I networked and whenever there was a function that had the words global or cross border or international in it, I was there, and what I learned within a couple of years was that there was a rather informal chapter associated with the US financial planning association that was dealing in these topics and that was it. There was nothing else and it was also around that time a few years later actually about 2013-2014 started a study group of young planners all of whom have come on to be essentially celebrities or very well known in the financial planning world is a fear bearer, Marybeth store. Johanna is CO CEO of a multi billion dollar firm and Southern California, Eric Rivershore is good his own following. And myself and actually not myself, delete that and Colin, Allen Moore who went on to found XY Planning Network. So all of these folks have gone on to tremendous success. And I saw what Allen had done was XY Planning Network and I thought to myself, there is an even greater need for folks to get help with international cross border because it’s more complicated, the stakes are higher. And this has nothing out there f, for people to get competent, professional advice. And so I partnered with an old friend and colleague, I might not look like it today, Allen but I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley Extension teaching folks coming through the CFP programme so, I was a lecture also taught at Golden Gate.

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Allen  

CFP being certified financial planner. Correct?

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Ashley  

You got it, yep, yep. This made strong FTLA’s three-letter acronyms. Right. Okay, so, yes. Be careful about my two. So I was teaching that I met my future co-founder Matt Goren. We put everything together that we know all the questions that we’ve ever come across, worked with a PhD student in Australia, and a PhD student in the US, and we put together a 10 lesson 30 hour masterclass on what a experienced financial planner would need to know, in addition to basic financial planning, what are the issues to do with sourcing of income, your foreign earned income exclusion? How does that work, foreign tax credits? How does that work? Owning rental property getting insurance across borders? How do we take care of health care? Where can you live and still be paid your Social Security benefit in retirement? What difficulties might an American encounter getting a bank account set up abroad? How do mortgages work in different countries? All these zillions of questions that came up and so we started this masterclass. And it’s been an interesting experience. I’m happy to expand on that and go in whatever direction you want.

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Allen  

Well, I’ve mentioned this is somebody who’s listened in on the masterclasses because I find it, you know, really engaging is, you know, in the United States, we often think about, you know, financial planning, hey, I’m thinking about moving from Delaware to California, and then a financial planner works with you. And it’s very, it’s complex. And what you just touched upon is something that is funny to me is, hey, I’m thinking about moving from Delaware to Costa Rica, or Australia yet, I would think that so much as you’ve touched, it’s so much more complex, and there’s so many more moving pieces yet, you would need to find a special person in the financial planning area who sees the big picture or has gone through the training of the Financial Planning Institute. How many people I mean, first off in the United States, and maybe you know, this, maybe you don’t, but how many financial planners are there? And then how many of them, maybe, what percentage do you think would have any type of global outlook as it stands, either, because with more and more people moving cross border and something moving permanently, or semi-permanently like they were gonna go 2,3,4,5,6 years, this has got to be a really unique area. So I’d love a little bit of your, for our audience a little bit of, you know, benchmarking for us.

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Ashley  

There’s no question about that. So I could talk the leg off a chair Allen, when it comes to this sort of thing, because I love it, and I’m super passionate about it. But I’ll try not to talk any legs off any chance. The thing with financial planners so there’s 300,000, so-called financial advisors in the US. Morningstar, the independent Chicago research has produced a study every other year, called the Global Fund Investor experience survey. And in that survey, one of the dimensions that they look at is to do with this we used to look at I think they’ve dropped this one because the lead author died and so they’ve had to divvy it up amongst the remaining people and that apparently got cut. They used to have a dimension of that study that referred to sales experience. And in the US while coming out. Number one overall, if you couldn’t choose to invest anywhere in the world, the US is probably the best place based on the four criteria that they outline. The US actually comes in last with sales experience, and it perfectly ties to what you’re talking about. In Australia, the term financial planner is a protected term. In the US, the term Accountant. Doctor is a protected term. I couldn’t go start an alternative remedies clinic and call myself a doctor, actually, because it’s a protected term, it connotes a level of training experience, you know, examinations, etc. In the US, we don’t have that. 

So what you have instead is this ragtag group of individuals with varying degrees of expertise and standards of care, that all call themselves financial advisors. What I think the educated consumer could do to try and figure out who they want to work with would be to say, what’s the standard of care that this person owes me? Do they owe me a suitability standard of care? Could they just sell me whatever is on their rack? Like, you go to the Dodge dealership, and you say, I want a small, lightweight, fuel efficient hybrid? They say, Sir, we don’t have, we don’t sell that here. But we have this great little car, you know, a theatre, pickup truck or whatever it is that they’re going to sell you. That’s a suitability standard of care. Versus you have a fiduciary standard of care, and that is you owe that client the best answer that you can reasonably attain for them. And that’s very different. I shouldn’t have used the coyote example a better one is, is the nutritionist versus the butcher shop. Go to the butcher shop. They’ve got a suitability standard. Oh, yeah, having a barbecue you know, here we got some great deals going on some lamb shanks, versus you talk to the nutritionists, they might tell you not to go to the barbershop, not the barbershop, the butcher shop at all. They might say, you know, your these levels are elevated, you’d actually do better to have this or that. And that’s the difference in the standard of care. Suitability versus fiduciary. 

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Allen  

Fiduciary, is it really important? I mean, you’re talking about is the fiduciary owes you the best advice they can give you? And actually, they’re liable if they don’t, right. It’s so it’s right. That’s, that’s a huge difference to me.

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Ashley  

That’s a huge, it’s a huge difference. And here’s the thing is that you’ve got these big brokerage firms out there that have thousands or tens of thousands of brokers-so-called advisors on their platforms, and they are the firstly, they’re not 100% fiduciaries. They operate, confusingly, and this is by design by the so-called self-regulatory organisations. They came out a couple of years ago, this thing called best interest, BI, it’s which shouldn’t be called BS, but it’s called bi regulatory beat for best interest. And it’s not it’s, there are carveouts and exceptions. It’s like, yeah, I follow regulatory best interest. But if you know that that’s a defined term that includes special carve-outs where I don’t need to actually do what’s in your best interest, I do what’s in my best interest, then it’s, it just makes it so hard to find an advisor. If I was giving someone advice, if I was just talking to random person podcasts, I would say, Go find a fee only advisor the only way they get paid is directly by you. Does that eliminate all conflicts of interest? No, it doesn’t, but it’s a pretty good starting place.

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Allen  

I’m going to build another question for you that financial planners? Well, I was just gonna say one of the things that ties in find good financial planners will help you with business planning. So, you know, a lot of the people that listen to this podcast are, you know, small business owners or business owners that you know, maybe business buy and sell things, you know, obviously taxes talk a little bit about that is, is how engaged are people in what like, for instance, you know, I own a small business, I gotta start about secession planning, who’s going to take the business how’s it going to be passed over equitably help out with that?

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Ashley  

So first, I became a financial planner because I love this kind of thing. And I love being a partner, a true trusted partner with my clients and help them as life unfolds. Coincidentally, Allen maybe thinking about upcoming conversation yesterday taking a bike ride and I was thinking about exactly this, exactly this question. And here’s what I came up with. I thought How would I describe the value delivered to some of my long-term clients? So I’m thinking of a particular client of mine owns a company in northern Calif. volunteer. We’ve been working together now for about nine years. And over that time, his business has expanded interstate and across the state of California. His girls, we had a conversation just last week about the funding status for their college accounts. They’re now teenagers from when they were just toddlers when we first started working together. We’ve done by cell analyses, we’ve helped his dad with a plan his dad has, I don’t know if you could say he’s got an addiction exactly. But it’s not very reliable with money. So help them out, help them out with a strategy for what would make sense for them, for aged care and long-term care solutions. The client unfortunately has gotten divorced, we’ve sought out a specialist planner, because there’s a lot to know about divorce, like, you know what I want the best for you go and talk to this divorce planner, they can help you through this. I’ll be there for the bigger-picture stuff. But engage with the divorce planet gauged with business attorneys, estate attorneys, real estate attorneys, we’ve looked at refinancing properties we’ve looked at all sorts of exchange deals, seller notes, I mean, you name it, it goes all over the place. And that’s because he has a special place in his heart or his head or wherever I live for him where he thinks, you know, I’m gonna get Ashley’s opinion on this. And I feel I bring my best game to that kind of client, where is he? He rubs me and he says, let’s, let’s hear what you have to say about this.

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Allen  

Well, you’re included in the big picture. So then you can actually see the forest for the trees and come up with the answers. The other thing, though, with what you’re dealing with is, when you’re dealing with the US and the IRS, aren’t we set up differently tax-wise than almost any other country in the world? 

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Ashley

Yeah. 

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Allen

And maybe expound for audience on that. Because this is, this podcast has obviously beenlisten to by both US and non-US, but seems like the IRS, and we won’t even getting going into FATCA and the banking regulations of the US that extend out but we’d love your quick comment and education to people that hate the IRS travels with you if you’re going and earning income outside of the US correct if you’re an American citizen.

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Ashley  

Yeah, the US is unique amongst developed countries, there’s Eritrea, which has a similar thing, and China is increasingly copying the US. But funnily enough, the US is moving away from the citizenship-based taxation. But the thing with most other developed countries, let’s just use Australia as an example is if you leave Australia and you go and work in the Bahamas, or in the UAE, or wherever Australia says you’re not here, okay, we’re not going to tax you unless you’ve got an investment property or a business or something that still ties back to Australia, assuming that’s not the case, then we’re not going to tax you because you’re not here. And that seems to me like a pretty fair way to do things. The US on the other hand does not do that. The US says we don’t care if you’re a US citizen if you’re in Antarctica or Zimbabwe or anywhere in between, we are going to assess you for taxation. Now. Does that mean we are going to tax you because there is a system setup of foreign tax credits, foreign earned income exclusion, so forth that go a long way to preventing that. But there are still some gotchas in there, there are still some transactions and things that can happen that can throw things off. In fact, I’m dealing with one of them right now with a client, a green card holder married to a US citizen looking to leave the US. Unbeknownst to many is the US actually has an exit tax that came into effect in 2008. So if you leave the US, yeah, and you satisfy one of three conditions. If you meet one of these three conditions, then an exit tax will apply to you. The first two are pretty rare. The first one is have you been compliant with your state and federal taxes for the past five years? All right, most people are gonna say yes. And if they’re not, they’re gonna get compliant. Test number two is did you have an average federal tax liability in 2022? It’s about $160-$870,000. That’s a federal tax liability, not your AGI. You gotta be making big bucks. You were talking over 650 800,000 depending on your filing status before you have an average federal tax liability of that over the past five years, or have a really, really, really big 2021 return as one client did insurance sector but the third one is that low hanging branch that hits people in the head on their way out the door. And that’s, do you have a global net worth of 2 million US dollars or more, and when you add up owning a house, the retirement accounts, the accounts, the RSUs, whatever, that gets a lot of people. And the unfortunate thing about that is assets held in joint title. So with your spouse, they count 100% to your net worth for the purposes of this exit tax. So the US applies an exit tax which is also very nasty. So we’ve got citizenship-based taxation, lots of reporting goes on with that. Very steep penalties if you don’t comply with the reporting a few glitches if you’re not careful, and don’t do your planning, right. And then there’s the exit tax, it is not really related to the citizenship-based taxation, but it is a nasty thing that the US has.

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Allen  

And of course, the banking regulations of FATCA, where somebody’s supposed to read these foreign banks supposed to report back to us that somebody has deposits, they’re earning income, or etc. Makes it very hard for Americans, I guess, to get bank accounts to in some, some jurisdictions, we’ve heard from some of our folks so that, you know, it actually brings up audience I think is really important is that, you know, if you’re crossing a border, it really makes sense to find somebody who has that working knowledge and talk to a financial planning professional. And we’ll make sure that in the show notes, we’ll share both Ashley’s information at his own firm and about the Global Financial Planning Institute. 

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Now, Ashley, this is the point in the show that we kind of go kind of a little bit of a different direction. You’re somebody who is a person who’s traveled person who understands the greater nature of the world. So we always ask, would you have an overlooked person, place, or experience that you would suggest that our listeners discover?

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Ashley  

Wow, yeah, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is the Spanish island of Mallorca overlooked place, it is a really cool place. I went there on a cycling tour a couple years ago, it’s where a lot of the pro teams go in the offseason to train but even if you weren’t a cyclist, it’s just a beautiful little island. And it’s not even that little like it takes a couple hours to drive, you know, from one point to the next or to from the southern tip to the top. So it’s not tiny by any means. And there’s little towns all over the place. It’s really cool. Mallorca.

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Allen  

So Ashley, is that where Nadal is from or am I off on that? Raphael Nadal, the tennis player? I think it was Mallorca I know he’s from.

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Ashley  

I don’t know if he’s from there. But I do remember that he has a training camp on Majorca. Yeah.

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Allen  

Yeah, that would be tremendous. And of course, the food I would think would be tremendous.

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Ashley  

Do you know that Majorca is actually known in not such a great light in Australia, because there was a comment, not unlike Bernie Madoff. In the 1980s, a guy called Christopher’s case, who chose Majorca as his location to hide out because Australia and Spain didn’t have an extradition treaty. And that’s where he decided to see out his day. So when you say Mallorca, the Aussies, they’re like, Oh, that’s a dodgy place to be associated with that. But if you go there, it’s actually a very, very lovely place.

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Allen  

Fantastic. So this has been a great conversation today, as if you could share with us how people can find you, personally, your firm, and also a little bit more about the Global Financial Planning Institute. And once again, we’ll have these in the show notes.

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Ashley  

I realized I didn’t answer part of your question from before. Allen, when I was talking about finished advisors, so it’s 300,000 across the US. In the GFP Institute, we have about 320 members in total, but only 75 have gone through the masterclass. So they’ve actually done that 10-week program. And you can find their details at GFP, as in global financial planning dot Institute. And there’s a find an advisor tool that’s there. So you can select the country that you’re interested in. And there’s a few other filters and criteria that you can use, but you can find someone right there, the GFP Institute and then I work with Australians and America and Americans in Australia to bring clarity, confidence, compliance, and strategy and structure to the Global Financial Affairs. That’s what I do. And you can find me at arete, which is written on the side of my shirt here. But it comes from the word Aristotle. So arete arete-ws.com. And that’s where you’ll find me and my phone.

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Allen  

And certainly folks can find you on LinkedIn?

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Ashley  

And LinkedIn. And I’m reluctantly on Facebook, because I have to be there for business. But I’m there to normally be the most prompt checker of messages.

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Allen  

Well, we certainly if we went to Facebook, we’d love to see you on the motorcycle, or the bicycle or whatever you’re riding around in on things, so marvelous today. So I highly recommend to our audience when you do go overseas. And we hear you know, during this podcast, we talked about the importance of preparing for medical issues, and preparing your financial life and getting your taxes figured out. But also, before you move to a particular location, we’ve had a couple of conversations on you talking to a financial advisor, there might be places that make a lot more sense. All things being equal. So I highly endorse Ashley’s group, the Global Financial Planning Institute, like I said, I’ve been lucky enough to listen in and learn because I anticipate moving overseas someday in the not so distant future and it’s just great to learn. So, once again, thank you for listening in today. Once again with The New Nomad podcast. The way people find out about is word of mouth. Please tell somebody else. Please give us a good review and we look forward to hearing from you again in the future. Continue to travel well travel safe. And once again, make sure that your taxes are paid correctly. And Ashley can help you with that. Cheers.