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Jeff D. Opdyke is an American financial writer and investment expert based in Prague, Czech Republic. He spent 17 years covering personal finance and investing for the Wall Street Journal, worked as a trader and a hedge fund analyst, and has written 10 books on such topics as investing globally and personal finance.
Today, he travels the world in search of unique income and investment opportunities—the kind of opportunities you are absolutely not hearing about in the mainstream (or even alternative) financial media. To get his latest boots-on-the-ground research and analysis delivered direct to your inbox, sign up to receive his Field Notes.
I’d come to Croatia to figure out if it is a place I might want to live, or recommend to others who are looking for a way to live and work in Europe now that Croatia is one of the newest members of the “digital nomad visa club.”
A second passport is the ultimate way to protect your family’s safety, security, and wealth and can open the door to a world of international investment and income options that are off limits to you now. That’s why Jeff is hosting a special event this November: The Second Passport Seminar: Why You Need One and How to Get One.
The Treaty of Trianon. You’ve likely never heard of it. It happened in the summer of 1920, a year after the Treaty of Versailles, the summit that ended World War I. Trianon carved up the Hungarian Empire, the eastern half of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That cleavage left the new country of Hungary with about 7.6 million people...
Today, the birthplace of democracy can still be a messy place—just as it increasingly is across the U.S., the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. But this, too, is Greece: A country so beautiful, calm, relaxing— and so relatively inexpensive—that it’s attracting retirees happily trading the messiness elsewhere for the messiness of a more fulfilling...
More Americans are saying goodbye, farewell, auf Wiedersehen to Uncle Sam and his American way of life. These increasing numbers of Americans are decamping for Europe, says a recent Bloomberg article that was picked up and run all over the place it seems like. I came across six or seven versions of this story in the last week...
If the rising cost of living is threatening to downgrade your lifestyle too, I recommend following a similar strategy to me and my wife. We plan on “dating” a few countries before we make a bigger commitment.
Too many of us Americans will never afford the retirement we imagined, and which the American Dream promised when we were younger. The cost of living a typical American life today has exploded past anything resembling rationality and has taken expected lifestyle off the table for so many. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Most of the time, countries cut off the family tree at grandparent. A tiny few go back to great-grandparent. Italy goes so far as great-great-grandfather. And then there’s Hungary. The country quietly passed a citizenship law in 2011 that might just be the most generous citizenship-by-ancestry plan ever. If you can prove that anyone in your family tree was Hungarian...
“This isn’t what I was hoping for,” my fiancée Yuliya grumped as we strolled a mundane street from the train station of Karlovy Vary, the 650-year-old Czech spa town founded by Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, Charles IV. Five minutes later, as we approached the town center, she had drastically recalibrated: She was in love.
Whether it’s banking, opening an overseas brokerage account, or access to opportunities such as my $21,000 crypto play, Uncle Sam is an albatross around our neck. He either paternalistically prevents us from investing our money as we see fit, or he imposes such numbingly burdensome rules that financial companies see Americans as liabilities to actively avoid...