Offshore Account

What is an offshore account, and how do you open one? Or rather, why would you even want to?

Onshore is...us. The U.S. of A. We have laws. And rules. Which, well...some people follow, anyway. And we have taxes to pay for our military defense and football stadiums and Congressional mistress travel. We’re not perfect. But show us a better place, and we’ll salute them while standing.

So when you hear someone musing about opening an offshore account, odds are good that they are trying to find a way to hide taxes that they probably legally owe to the U.S. government.

Now, this is not always the case. Someone might be running a small business importing coffee from Guatemala, and they need a bank account off shore, like...in Guatemala to pay for the beans because, um, the Guatemalan bean-selling company doesn’t accept U.S. currency.

Like...really? Our currency isn’t good enough for them? Yeah...skepticism alert. But it does happen, and people do open offshore accounts, often under very snazzy-sounding marketing slogans by large global banks that take extremely high privileges for doing so.

Offshore accounts aren’t illegal, and the clever marketing that runs behind them includes things like, um, "Diversify your political risk because, uh, the U.S. Government might go under, and you should really have an account in the Caymans and the Bahamas and Belize because, well, those countries are...solid. Their banking systems are better protected than those in the U.S."

Oh, and then there’s the lawsuit protection slogan. Like, you might do something very bad in the U.S., get sued for it, lose, and then the way to make it harder for your suers to collect is to squirrel away your money in a foreign bank. Yeah, that makes sense...and yes, it's ok to mumble and muse what kind of customer these offshore accounts are attracting.

And then there’s the “Diversify your currency” slogan. Like you need an offshore account to do so. And like normal people should even begin to worry about diversifying currency. The presumption is that the average Joe will somehow do better than the 30 million dollar-a-year Wall Street talent who is actually trained how to invest in currencies by, um…diversifying? Buying New Zealand and Aussie dollars to do better than American dollars in some meaningful way? Yeah. Not bloody loikely.

Don’t forget the "access to medical care" argument. The high-fee banks will plant all kinds of worry warts on your brain that somehow you can’t get the medical care you need in the U.S. And yes, it’s a slog here, but that somehow having an offshore account in The Philippines will give you better medical care access? Really?

The implication here is that you broadly get “peace of mind,” or the ability to transact globally, by having one of these very expensive accounts housed in the Isle of Man or Jersey or, uh, some other foreign shadow country. You know the saying: if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck? Yeah. Probably a goose.

Offshore accounts. If you do get one, you’ll want your club card so you can always get in to The Dark Side.