From the Archive – August 2012

“August for the people and their favourite islands,” the poet tells us. How often the client wants his holiday destination to become his retirement destination! On the website, members can find our Retirement books, which outline the tax situation in many of them. The tax regimes in Cyprus, Guernsey, Ireland and the Isle of Man are described in Retirement in Europe of April 2006, as well as those of Gibraltar, which of course isn’t an island but feels like one, Malta (one and a little one) and the United Kingdom, which is really an island-and-a-quarter, plus several little ones. Retirement in the Caribbean of August 2006 covers Anguilla, Antigua (plus Barbuda), the Cayman Islands (of which there are three), Dominica, St. Kitts (and Nevis), St. Lucia, and the US Virgin Islands (three and some small ones), as well as the Bahamas, which has 700 of them, many uninhabited, the British Virgin Islands (fewer but prettier), the Netherlands Antilles (now broken up into its constituent parts) and the numerous islands which form St. Vincent in the South and Turks & Caicos in the North. Ten Retirement Destinations appeared in 2007. There we find Australia, Mauritius, New Zealand (two), Seychelles (several) and Singapore, as well as Hong Kong, which is even less of an island than Gibraltar, but can feel more like one.

Not all of the favourite retirement destinations are islands: these three publications also cover China, Florida, France, Greece, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Panama, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and Thailand. The information in all the chapters is necessarily a bit out of date (e.g. in France), and it hardly needs to be said that no reading of any of them is a substitute for taking local advice (preferably, of course, from a fellow ITPA member). But they are a good place to start. Some professional advisers have printed out copies for the client to take home and read, like a menu of options, and rumour has it that assiduous clients have eventually gone to live in places they hadn’t previously heard of!

Milton Grundy