The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat by Andrew Hallam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing is a book by Andrew Hallam that outlines some of the main issues expatriate investors face. I was excited when I first learned about this title because Wiley press generally does a good job with their business publications and because the author is a Canadian expatriate. I figured Hallam would bring up lots of issues that Canadian expatriates face.
During my life as a financial advisor, I’ve been able to work with a few expat Canadians, but found the process of working with expats within a Canadian financial institution to be very difficult. Canadian brokerages are hemmed-in by numerous regulations that make them unwilling to deal with most expats or investors without Canadian tax addresses. The issue of where expats should hold investment accounts is covered adequately in this book. The author suggests the same choices that I’ve found during my own research. TD Waterhouse International in Luxembourg is the best choice for many expat investors. DBS in Singapore is also a good choice.
Maybe many expat investors are more comfortable with their tenuous legal residency and citizenship situations than I would be, but I think the author could have provided more analysis on the choices that expat investors regarding their residency. Maybe for most expat investors, their tax residency is led by their lifestyle choice; and their tax residency isn’t a financial decision. Each investor has their own unique situation that would make tax residency a more or less important question.
One of the weak points of this book is the exhaustive time the author spends on the choice between active or passive portfolio management. The topic of investment style is separate from the issues faced by the expatriate investor and I think the author should have spent much less time on this topic. Each investor has a different level of knowledge, interest, and time to spend on their portfolio investments, so a passive approach to investing is not always the best choice, although the author presents the passive investing approach as the best one. Sure, indexing and passive investing benefits many individual investors, but from my experience as a financial advisor, this fact seems obvious to an interested observer, but not to someone who has no knowledge, desire, or time to spend managing their own investment portfolio. What is a bigger challenge for those not interested in finance is how to find an advisor and platform that can do the work of managing a portfolio for them. The author does provide some resources to this point.
