Packing Your Go Bag with David Lesperance

george grombacher 0:02
David Lesperance is an attorney. He is the managing director of Les bronze and Associates. He is a leader in the world of taxation and citizenship advisory and he is back on life blood. Welcome back to the show, David.

David Lesperance 0:15
Thanks for inviting me back, George.

george grombacher 0:17
Yeah, excited to have you back on refresh our memory. Tell us a little about your personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do.

David Lesperance 0:25
Sure, I try not to be an International Man of Mystery. I’m a Canadian, who lives in Poland. That simply because I had somebody fall asleep on me in an aeroplane boat 12 years ago, when she woke up, I said, Well, now that we’ve slept together, maybe we should go out on a date. And that has resulted in marriage and soon to be 10 year old children. I basically look at how residences and ship and domicile impact families around the world. We look at how it impacts them from tax, family law, mobility, sovereign risk, etc. And in our last interview, I threw out the somewhat dangerous for a Canadian to say to an American audience analogy of imagine you live in a wildfire. And what are those wildfire concerns and we talked about for Americans, they can be a combination of things from anti semitism, anti Muslim racism, political polarization, mass shootings, I grew up, I’m a child of the auto industry. I grew up in Windsor, Ontario, my father would work in Detroit. So I grew up when it was murder city, but back then it was, you know, two drug dealers shooting at each other with Saturday night specials. Now you’ve got, you know, people walking in with AR fifteens into theaters and bowling alleys and synagogues and churches. And it’s just a different world. And another is the wildfire concern that a lot of my clients have is tax policy kind of tax, the rich policy. We are doing this interview at the beginning of a wild week, last week, when Super Tuesday, the Republican and Democrat candidates have now kind of solidified and we had a State of the Union address where President Biden again weighed down the marker of taxing unrealized capital gains. And just hours ago, he put forth his budget proposals with the same thing. So when you’re in a wildfire zone, what do you do? Well, clients say I’m going to fight the fire, I’m going to vote I’m going to register, I’m going to donate to Super PACs and candidates. And that’s all very noble and very good things to do. But no, fire marshal drops accrue into a hot zone without having an exit strategy. So we look at how second residences and citizenships act as kind of fire insurance. And then we match that in with a fire escape plan, which tends to fall into three different types. One, I’ll call the go bag option, oh my god, there’s been a hurricane hitting my home in Florida, I need to bug out for, you know, a few months to Canada, Portugal, New Zealand, wherever, Panama. But I’m not going to be there long enough to become tax resident, not either jurisdiction. Then the second is, oh, my god insert name of the political party, you didn’t vote for God in I want to go and live abroad for four years, and maybe I’ll give my kids experience of education or living abroad. So they’re going to be Americans living in another jurisdiction. And again, if that’s a taxing jurisdiction, how the interaction of us and that foreign jurisdictions tax are because the US has this unique citizenship based taxation. And the final is kind of full blown expatriation. So I’m going to legally and permanently leave the US tax system behind and all the kind of integrated tax and immigration strategies involved in

george grombacher 4:25
all that. Appreciate that. I feel like as I’m getting older, as we all are, David that things always feel like they’re getting worse. Are things really actually getting worse this time is this more palpable than it ever has been?

David Lesperance 4:46
I’ve been doing this since 1990. And this is as chaotic as I’ve ever seen the world. This 2024 is an election year in much of the world. We’ve seen every thing from Taiwanese elections. As the economy of different countries are in collapse, we’re seeing changes of regimes. We’re seeing wars in the Ukraine and in Israel and Gaza. It is very chaotic. Particularly, you know, it’s an election year in the United States. And as I’ve been telling clients, normally in an election year, you look for the October surprise, but this year, it’s the surprise of the day that ends with why I mean, it’s every day, something new and if somebody was foolish enough to kind of bet, what the outcome of the November elections would be. I would say, I think you are delusional and or huge risk taker. So it’s really equipping my clients with optionality for whatever’s going to happen. We could have a Republican sweep of POTUS and the two houses of Congress, we could just as easily have a democratic sweep. There are a number of as Donald Rumsfeld used to say, known knowns and known unknowns, what are they going to be the outcomes of various court cases, etc? And then there’s a number of unknown unknowns. Could there be a health issue? Could there be another war could, you know, there’s just so many things going on, and political winds are blowing that wildfire around, and it’s impossible to conclude where it’s going to end up? By the end of the year. optionality

george grombacher 6:45
is a wonderful term, and very prudent to it’s just better to have more options than it is to have certainly less and no options is, is not an enviable place to be. There’s so many different things to be talking about here. And probably the most important would be just a tax perspective. But let’s, let’s assume that that that we have that you have clients that come into your office, one is is is a Muslim, one is a Jew, they’re married. And they say, I just we’re uncomfortable. In London, we’re uncomfortable in the United States. Is there a place that they could go right now?

David Lesperance 7:27
I’m sure I mean, the difference between the United States and elsewhere, is that the bigots are well armed. Whether you’re worried about anti semitism or any Muslim, and whether you’re in Toronto or London, or, you know, anywhere, not currently in a war zone, it is going to be a lower level of threat. As one of my clients recently said, yeah, there’s anti semitism, anti semitism rising everywhere. But, again, the anti Semites in the US have AR fifteens. And so that was kind of a real concern. And I have, again, I started going to the Gulf in 1990. So I have a large Muslim clientele. I’ve been having clients do Alia, for a number of years, I have had a number of Israeli clients who were out in the streets before October 7, kind of protesting against Netanyahu. And the concerns are still there. I had one, I had a number of clients who were kind of Israeli tech founders, a lot of whom met during their time in the IDF, and who were called up as reservists and I’m still talking to them. And they said, Look, I believe in the State of Israel, I, you know, sworn an oath to my my fellow servicemen, I will serve my duty, but I don’t want to raise my kids in a war zone. And they said I was protesting against Netanyahu before, and he doesn’t have a plan that I agree with, for if and when this ever and so, you know, it is time for me to get some optionality and and a backup plan or a fire escape plan. Fair enough. I appreciate and one of the things George, I wanted to say is just because you have fire insurance and a fire escape plan, doesn’t mean that you need to trigger them. It just means that if you kind of, you know, to beat this analogy to death, smell the smoke, you’ve got the option of believing, because the damage whether that’s fiscally or to your family’s wealth, or well being would be significant. When you consider the premium of getting that fire insurance and the fire escape plan. I mean, there’s just no comparison.

george grombacher 9:48
It strikes me as important as buying a life insurance policy or disability insurance policy. So

David Lesperance 9:56
yeah, the other thing is, I may have mentioned this in our previous Interview and I always have to say I swear my siblings and I didn’t go nightclubbing looking for Europeans to dance with but my sister married a Latvian. My brother married in Italian, I married a Scots woman and a pole and my younger sister married an Irishman. And the good thing about the fire insurance is not only use it as defensive, it’s also an opportunity. You know, my nieces and nephews and children have done everything from kind of study gap years working abroad. So and it’s something of course, that they’re now passing on to and will pass on to their children in the future. So the decisions that, you know, our ancestors made, you know, generations ago in in coming to North America had a profound effect not just on their lives, but on all the subsequent generations and the same thing. The decisions that clients are making in this area will have a profound effect on future generations along with their own lives.

george grombacher 11:02
You’re shaped that in terms of unrealized capital gains, do you have a sense of what percentage of Americans that would touch?

David Lesperance 11:13
Well, if we look particularly at what, what has been called the billionaire Tax Act, first off is defined not at a billion but 100 million. And it’s quite onerous. And so I just there was a court case, the Supreme Court heard in December, we’re expecting a decision in June, or July called the Moore case, which really looked at the taxation of unrealized capital gains, is that constitutional? And if the court overturns the lower court decision says it’s unconstitutional? Well, you’ve just eliminated one of the major barriers to expatriation which is the Deem disposition exit tax, so you’re gonna see an increase in people leaving, then if they say it is constitutional, then you brought a constitutional basis for the billionaire tax. And it is quite popular. And so I’ve had clients go, I don’t think that will really happen. Again, let’s put it in the insurance analogy. In order for the billionaire tax to occur, two things need to happen. Number one is more needs to decide that that’s constitutional. Number two, the Democrats have to hit the trifecta in November. Let’s say that both of those things happening is 25%. Given the tax hit the damage to your fiscal house, I mean, would you if there was a 25% chance that a fire was going to hit your house? Would you get fire insurance and a fire escape plan? Yes. So that, again, shows just the, the logic of doing this, I was once accused by somebody being looking at the world like Mr. Spock, which she thought it was an insult. I took it as untrue but aspirational. And if you look at the world, kind of, you know, in, in that view, a lot of these practical steps are quite logical, and, you know, could mean significant tax or, you know, avoiding other very damaging things to your family’s wealth and welfare.

george grombacher 13:38
Thank you. It’s a, I guess, a unique opportunity for us on the show here and us in the United States to speak with somebody who’s actually living in Poland. President Biden made mentioned that Putin was going to continue marching across Europe, to people in Poland, do you all think that your next

David Lesperance 14:00
it’s a concern, um, I live in a port city called gardenia where the Polish Navy is there. And we have a nice view of the harbour and every morning, we see the Polish Navy ships coming out into the harbor, what they’re doing is getting all the Signal Ops from Cologne and grab which is an outpost of of, of Russia. Also, I have some contacts in the Polish military, in NATO. And, you know, I said are you is Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia, the Baltic states, which were former Soviet Union. Yeah. Are you concerned about a Russian invasion? And his response was the Russians and what army? Because one of the things that has turned out in the invasion of the Ukraine is that the Russian army, you know, wasn’t that operational, modern armies are, you know, highly technical things. And if you don’t maintain the 5000 tanks, you end up having 1000 operational tanks. And Russia is, you know, being able to manufacture, you know, artillery shells and things like that. But when you’re going against a very sophisticated army, that being said, I don’t want to be here when it when it’s when it happens. This is also, Gdansk. Gdynia is also the place where, arguably the Second World War started on September 1 1939, when a German German warship, you know, started bombing a place called Vesta, Papa, it’s kind of Poland’s Alamo, and the brave poles held out for about nine days and turned off German Marines and all kinds of things. And they finally surrendered. And I was touring it, this site, free COVID. And there was a, a Polish American fellow from Chicago who naturally kind of gravitated towards me because I spoke English. And as you get at every tour site around the world, there’s a very earnest history major who’s your tour guide, and talked about how the brain poles held out and that the captain of the warship was so impressed that he let the commander keep his sword. And somebody asked, So what happened to the nine poles that surrendered? That Well, you know, turn them over to the ISS and shot them. And the Polish American guys said, Yeah, my family left in 1938. Our family motto was, the pessimists left and lived, the optimists stayed and died. So again, you want to have the fire insurance, you want to have the fire escape plan, which I certainly do with with my family. And, you know, we have the ability in a modern age, unlike 1939 to move out and move quickly.

george grombacher 17:07
That’s a wonderful transition into how do we start that process of exploring fire insurance and you’ve laid out several different options, but certainly three, the go bag, a middle option? And then expatriation?

David Lesperance 17:24
Well, it’s really understanding what your concerns are and what your family needs are. I always tell clients, you know, I’ll have clients who say, Look, I’ve been sued, I’ve been audited, I go through a divorce, move me somewhere where there’s no lawyers and no tax system. And so my kind of glib answer is, okay, well, maybe the Pitcairn Island, only 38 people on Earth have decided that, oh, no, no, I want schools, I want airports, I want housing, I want it, you know, all these things. So it’s really understanding what your, your needs are of all the family because you’ve got to live it. Then really, you know, talking to a professional looking at a deep dive as to what is your background, there. If you Google second citizenships or second passports, you’ll get a number of paid Google ads from what I call the usual suspects, who are paid commission driven paid salespeople, and they’re pushing whatever product will pay them the highest commission, I had a client that I saved an enormous amount of money from, he had been sold by a salesperson and I said, Okay, well, you got a very Irish last name. Would you happen to have a, you know, parent or grandparent unborn, of course. And I said, Well, I can get to that same citizenship that this guy was trying to sell you for a million dollars, million euros. It was going to pay him about 100,000 euros and commission for 1/40 of the price. Oh, okay. That’s great. But remember, it’s not like you can die at one 800 I am Irish and a leprechaun gonna deliver the passport to you. There is a process and the timing does that work in so really having, you know, conflict free I don’t take commissions. In fact, if we have to go for a residence or citizenship by investment, I upload those Commission’s Back to the client. So they know I’m completely agnostic with it, but it’s really kind of understanding what your concerns are, what your family needs are, and then getting in touch with professionals. And again, you don’t just want to talk to a tax lawyer. You don’t want to just talk to an immigration lawyer, you don’t want to just you want to have an integrated team that’s going to put together you know, get you the right fire insurance and put together a proper you know, fire escape plan that fits all those needs and is operational. When when you determine if and when dangerous has gotten too close that you need to trigger it.

george grombacher 19:54
Makes sense? I love it. David, thank you so much for coming back on where can people learn Learn more about you how can they engage in the process?

David Lesperance 20:03
Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s David Lesperance, L E S, P E R, A N C, E. Also, my website is Lesperance, associates portal.com. And you can see the contact details on both the LinkedIn and on the website. And you’ll probably I’m sure put them in the show notes.

george grombacher 20:29
I absolutely well. If you enjoyed this as much as I did show, David, your appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. And certainly never our intention to scare the bejesus out of you. But optionality and flexibility are key. And that’s exactly what David’s been talking about. So take the first step, reach out and just start exploring fire insurance and figure out what’s right for you and your family. So that you can be in that pessimists camp that how does how does the saying go again, David

David Lesperance 21:05
Asmus, left and waves optimists stayed and died.

george grombacher 21:09
Maybe that’s not the best way to close but you, you certainly get the idea. Find David on LinkedIn and then less bronce associates.com and figure out what makes sense for you. Thanks again, David. Thank you, George. Till next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.