BY KAYLA BRANDON From Independent Journal

Plenty of Americans have said they’ll move to Canada if Trump becomes president, but considering Canadians pay an exorbitant amount of taxes, one international financial advisor suggests a sunnier location: the Caribbean.

Nuri Katz, President at APEX Capital Partners, tells Independent Journal Review that Americans aren’t just talking about fleeing the country; they’re going a step further and renouncing their U.S. citizenship.

Described as a business where “consultants have guided affluent individuals and their families through the complexities of foreign investing, and of obtaining alternate citizenship and residency, APEX is a global company with offices in Dominica, Greece, Canada, and St. Kitts/Nevis.

While Katz, who was born in the U.S., has been living in Canada for 45 years, he says moving to the Caribbean instead of the maple country might be a better alternative:

“For Americans, the whole tax issue is a really tough thing. You can’t just pick up and move to Caribbean and not worry about taxes. As long as you’re an American citizen, you still pay U.S. taxes.

Having said that, more and more Americans are renouncing their American citizenship. A record number every year, for various reasons, do this. I think more and more are going to renounce in 2016 — and we are getting a lot more than what we used to get — interest, that is, from Americans to get citizenship elsewhere. I expect a HUGE spike in that after November because of the very strong feelings that people have about the two candidates.”

As Fortune reports, 1,058 Americans renounced their citizenship in just the final quarter of 2015 alone, which is a stark contrast to the 300 who did so in all of 2006.

Katz says the incentive for Americans to cut ties with their roots is largely financial, but moving away doesn’t solve the problem like they might think:

“Americans have a problem and that is that they’re taxed on worldwide income no matter where they live.

Even if you renounce your American citizenship, you pay a capital gains tax on your whole net worth in order to do so. So say you have house that’s worth $5 million, a company worth $10 million and gold worth $20 million — you have to pay a capital gains tax on everything that you have in order to renounce your citizenship. It’s very complicated.”

Once an American renounces his U.S. citizenship — and finishes paying the capital gains tax on everything he owns — his financial commitment to the U.S. government ends.

And after that experience, he may never want to pay taxes again in his life. If that’s the case, Katz recommends moving to somewhere in the Caribbean.

In fact, relocating to sunny Antigua means never having to pay an income tax at all. And getting a Caribbean citizenship is much easier than giving up U.S. citizenship:

“In the Caribbean it takes 3-4 months to get citizenship, not long depending on who you are and how complicated your history has been. It’s a relatively easy process.”

Katz explains that he himself hasn’t yet renounced his U.S. citizenship, despite having lived in another country for 45 years. He says his father was a refugee who came to America after a “long and difficult” struggle to get there, so for him, it’s personal:

“Emotionally, it’s difficult for me, but if you take out emotion, and focus only on the ideological part of potentially living under either Trump or Hillary, you can understand a lot of people being really upset.

I was speaking yesterday to a Russian client of ours, and he said to me, ‘It’s absolutely amazing to me — this country that has thousands of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia graduates, all they could come up with is Hillary and Trump? Out of 300+ million people, all they could come up with are these two? One has a whole history of corruption and the other one has a history of bankruptcy. Every partner, every investor who’s ever dealt with him has lost.’

I can understand that people upset with the situation and just want to get out…aside from issues of taxes and other financial issues.”

He says he’s hearing from plenty of people who are thinking about moving out of the States:

“To each his own, but Canada is a great place. Living in an exotic place is also not the worst thing in the world. If you’re a very high net worth individual, coming to Canada you can live the same life. The difference between NYC and Chicago and NYC and Toronto is nothing.”

A recent poll found more than one in every four Americans would “consider leaving” the U.S. if Trump wins, with others saying similar things if Hillary wins.

IMAGES:

Image Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

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For more on this story go to: http://ijr.com/2016/08/681363-if-considering-moving-to-canada-after-election-this-expert-suggests-you-move-to-caribbean-instead/