Citizenship by Investment Programs Review: Vanuatu

welcome back everyone michael here with offshore citizen today we are going to continue our review of citizenship by investment programs and in particular we're going to review the fastest citizenship by investment program which is vanuatu i'm going to tell you the good the bad the ugly why you should get it why you shouldn't get it who it's right for who it's not right for and so stick around before we do that though if you have not already please smash the subscribe button click it and uh also the notification bell so that you don't miss any of our notifications of the new videos coming out click the notification bell if you haven't already and you like this video you know click the the like button if you don't like the video please tell us why not in the comments we really appreciate the feedback if you're at all interested in getting second passports second citizenships uh alternate residencies being able to move somewhere paying the lowest legal amount of tax possible so reducing your tax or international tax planning asset protection offshore company formation or opening bank accounts etc reach out to us you can book a call with me for michael rosberg there's a link below or you can visit our website officecitizen.net offshorecapitalist.com okay let's dive in so for those of you who do not know i was talking to a client earlier today actually and so he was asking about various different citizenships and helping him figure out you know where would be the best place et cetera so we had a conversation with vanuatu and he's like i haven't even heard of bonumati so i certainly had not heard of vanuatu until i first got into this business you know whatever it was eight years ago or something like that uh and started you know helping people with structuring and i'm looking at countries to form companies and i learned all kinds of things about geography so vanuatu for those of you don't know is a small island in the south pacific it is famous for one beach in particular i think it's called champaign beach known to be one of the top beaches i have some clients who seem to really like it in general you know not a very established place not a large population etc you're probably not going to want to live there and so this brings up a really important point that i'll just touch on quickly which is listen you do not need to live where you get a second citizenship or where you get a citizenship period and you do not need a citizenship in order to live someplace okay so when you're buying a citizenship in some place like vanuatu you're probably doing it for visa free travel for a backup plan for possibly having you know some sort of escape hatch or something like that right so let's talk about would you want vanuatu so start off with i mean the main selling feature of vanuatu definitely is the speed okay so it is possible to get a vanuatu citizenship in approximately about a month and a half and you don't necessarily need to go to vanuatu it costs a little bit extra but we can arrange it for you so that they will come to you and they will go through the citizenship ceremony for you and get everything set up so that's one reason that people tend to like vanuatu okay it's also relatively inexpensive or relatively cost competitive in particular for like families of four okay so the base price is around 150 000 okay there's you know i'm talking about it's not actually 150 000 donation but by the time you layer on the fees and things like this it's around that now if you're talking about having a bunch of other people on it so your spouse your kids etc then it ends up cheaper than some of the other alternatives simply because of the fact that they don't burden you with a whole bunch of extra due diligence fees per person so this is one of the things that happens in a lot of these programs is they start throwing like a 7 500 per person due diligence fee on and all this kind of thing and the numbers inflate fairly quickly okay so vanuatu it's certainly not the cheapest it's definitely not terribly it's not much more expensive but it's a little bit more expensive than some of the alternatives like antigua etc if you're just talking about one person but as you add multiple people on it becomes more cost competitive with some of the other caribbean options okay the third reason that people may like vanuatu i don't know if i got to three but anyway however number i got there is you can change your name with vanuatu okay so this is attractive for some people uh and this is a good and a bad thing we're going to get into in a minute my assessment of what's going on but just to set some context it can be part of the process you can change your name and it is quite easy to be able to go through the process okay so a lot of the programs are pretty aggressive about their due diligence they can be aggressive about source of funds etc so for instance uh we're working with somebody for montenegro and kind of this question came up of hey listen there's somebody who has a background in crypto et cetera they're not necessarily going to let that through so that's a bit of an issue whereas in the case of vanuatu it's pretty lacks in terms of how the citizenship gets paid for and that's fairly attractive to people okay so that's another uh another another piece on here okay so what do i think about this citizenship well kind of what i told this client today is in my opinion you're principally looking at three factors when you're looking at a citizenship okay number one of course is you're looking at the price right makes sense how much it costs does matter number two you're looking at what is your visa free travel and access to other parts of the world and we're going to touch on that in a minute uh number three you're looking at the reputation okay these three things i think are probably the principal uh factors that you might want to consider i guess you could also throw in their speed right and uh and you know any other flexibility that might be relevant to you okay so how does vanuatu rank on these well we go down to the you know last one on flexibility it ranks very high especially in a time when you know you can't travel right now very well etc i mean this is great number two uh it ranks really well on speed right so fantastic option in that regard like i said it's the fastest program out there like theoretically i think you can get it in about a month i always tell people two months when i'm talking to them just because you know over promise not to do whatever kind of thing but in reality six weeks is a pretty reasonable number there's a bit of a thing about how it works because the citizenship committee meets and they review these applications and so if you haven't prepaid your deposit then it can basically you can get approved and then it can wait till the next session to go the next phase so you can delay yourself by a few weeks so that's that's something but by and large in most cases that shouldn't be a situation that should be an issue for you okay now let's talk about uh cost cost is okay as i said especially for a family but it's not amazing right it's definitely not like top of the top in terms of competitiveness from that standpoint uh previously i reviewed the turkish citizenship by investment program in that case i mean yeah you tie up more capital but you end up with much much uh lower cost in terms of like raw money out of pocket and i would say that tends to be true with a bunch of these others so certainly there's a couple of the caribbean programs that the base price is 100 000 you end up with some fees over on top of that so you know by the time all is said and done i'll review them specifically for you guys in an extra while but you know around 120 000 for one person and then you stack on fees for for dependents etc there is now some discount versions that they have that if you're willing to take longer and you know increase your obligations okay that can happen and and there's also some other programs where you can put money in and get an immediate refund back and things like this in places like nevis which again i'll do another video on that so the price of vanuatu is not amazing it's not terrible but not amazing okay what is the next factor the next factor that we can look at is visa free travel okay so visa free travel vanuatu is i would say mediocre it's certainly a tier 2 passport definitely not a tier 3 passport if you read on kind of some of the indexes they'll claim it's 130 countries visa-free access i mean depending on who you're reading and how they're defining visa-free and things like this you get into there uh to give you some contrast you know the top countries in the world would have you know like 170 180 type uh countries visa-free now i'm going to go through with you guys i got out the map here now if you want to look this up for yourself where i always send people just because of the ease of these maps is wikipedia wikipedia has a great thing you can basically look up visa requirements for citizens of blank vanuatu you know australia nevis whatever and it'll show you a map of where you get uh get visa free access okay by the way according to one of these passport indexes it's 40th in terms of uh travel freedom which by the way there will be like a bunch that are grouped for five or something like that so it's actually a little bit worse probably than it sounds now uh so we've got this uh this map here what is good and what is bad about this so if you want to be in latin america this is bad it has terrible access to latin america okay it doesn't have mexico it doesn't have brazil it doesn't have argentina it doesn't have chile you know this is not uh this has not got great access to latin america it's pretty good in uh in central america so you know costa rica panama etc uh you know a bunch of the caribbean islands uh in particular some of the the british ones uh which comes to our next part which is they've got all of europe okay all of europe is covered under vanuatu including uk and ireland okay so uk and ireland are typically the tougher ones to get uh they're not really that tough in if you have the paid passports but basically all the british overseas territories are also included so that's good you get uh russia that's an attractive thing for some people okay you don't get china okay you have parts of africa who cares particularly but hey you have it you have you know thailand malaysia stuff like this you don't have australia you don't have new zealand you don't have japan you don't have korea so you know that kind of gives you an idea what i always tell people is there's basically i would say maybe like five top tier countries that are hard to get into okay they're uk australia and new zealand canada uh the us okay maybe ireland i guess in there so that's six then there's some that are a little bit like lower but you know still kind of desirable ones so we have japan we have mexico we have brazil and then we have china and we have russia okay those are like the the tough countries to get into so most of the programs that you can buy barring turkey turkey's one that doesn't give you access to the eu except for ireland and uk okay there's only uh vanuatu well i mean there's a bunch that have it but there's a few that don't right so for instance montenegro doesn't ukraine doesn't i know ukraine is not official i have another video on that but anyway it's uh it's one uh so yeah you get into some of these cases that you don't get access to uk all right almost none of them give you access to canada the u.s almost none of them give you access to australia new zealand et cetera but this kind of gives you a little bit of an idea of where to go so if what you're concerned about is you're saying hey listen i'd like access to latin america bona mata maybe isn't the best option for you if you want access to southeast asia it's a little better than some of these caribbean ones okay if you're not really so concerned about that this is kind of a backup for you etc then hey vanuatu could be pretty good especially if you want something just fast this brings us to our last point what is the reputation of vanuatu vanuatu probably has the worst reputation out of the citizenship by investment programs unfortunately so what does that mean what does this mean what's the consequence of this really where this matters is in banking so there are some banks that just will not accept vanuatu citizens what this means is hey listen you're going to be in a situation where you're like hey if i want to open a bank account here if i still have my old passport okay maybe that's fine but if i'm relying on my vanuatu citizenship certainly a bunch of places will not accept you and that's not so good you can sometimes get around that by being a resident somewhere else so this is actually pretty common so for instance you know the person who immigrates from iran to canada and they can get bank accounts fine because they're considered under their canadian residency as opposed to their iranian citizenship place of birth right so you have that kind of thing but if you're actually from those countries then it's different anyway so how would i rank uh vanuatu i would rank vanuatu as kind of like a little below average in terms of quality of citizenship to get i think the main advantage is just the speed and uh and the ease of getting it where it ranks in terms of speed and ease it's top top it's very good in terms of cost like i said it's you know slightly expensive to middle of the road but in terms of quality i would say that it's down you know it's not as bad as say turkish right but it's it's definitely lower on the list so anyway that is my assessment for you of vanuatu if you're interested in finding out more about citizenships which one might be best for you whether you know again if you need a fat one fast you can reach out to us this is certainly an option then or you know there might be some other ones uh reach out to us you can book a clarity with me again clarity.family michael rosmart there's a link below in the description uh or you can check out our website offshorecitizen.net offshorecapitalist.com again links below if you have not already smash the subscribe button smash the notification bell get updated about all the latest videos all the latest news if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up we really appreciate any feedback that you've got please put any feedback you have or any questions whatever in the comments below and yeah i'm going to look forward to seeing you guys on the next video

Channel: Offshore Citizen

Views: 4,545

Rating: 4.8562875 out of 5

Keywords: Vanuatu citizenship by investment, Vanuatu CBI, nomad capitalist vanuatu, vanuatu citizenship by investment, vanuatu citizenship by investment program, vanuatu citizenship benefits, vanuatu citizenship by investment 2020, vanuatu passport, vanuatu passport for sale, vanuatu tax haven, zero tax countries, low tax countries, tax havens, citizenship by investment, second passport, second citizenship, dual citizenship, cbi

Id: dijBcMSIn5Y

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020