There are many survival benefits to be had from regular international travel.
Having an Escape Plan
Historically, human migration is a successful survival strategy. When things get volatile, those who can often beat feet to someplace more stable where they can raise their families in relative safety.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews used this strategy during WWII. Many left Germany and Austria for neighboring countries. Then those with the means fled even further abroad when Nazi Germany occupied those countries. Not all were successful. Around 100 thousand of those who fled were killed during the holocaust.
When it became clear they were going to lose, many Nazi’s did likewise. They created “Die Spinne”, a complex network of ratlines to help Nazi’s flee to Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and, more famously, to South America.
I have friends who say, “I would never leave the USA! This is our land, and we will die defending it if need be!” I get it. Some things are more important than whether I personally survive, but some folks would like to have a plan for their family to survive whether or they live themselves.
Survival is about adaptability and having options is part of being adaptable. Having escape plans gives you options.
Traveling Abroad Can Enable You to Secure a Lifeboat Property
A lifeboat property is a property that acts as a lifeboat. It is someplace you can go in an emergency. I am not the first writer to write about this idea. Neil Strauss wrote about dual citizenship as a type of “insurance policy” in Emergency: This Book Can Save Your Life and he was by no means the first to do so. (Strauss, 2009) Some countries will give dual citizenship to people who invest a certain amount in real estate or in approved business ventures in their countries.
I think most survivalists are aware that billionaires build lifeboats for themselves, but what fewer people know is that you don’t have to be wealthy to build some sort of lifeboat for yourself. There are ways to do it on a smaller scale. In my case, I married someone from another country. I will stop short of calling marriage an inexpensive proposition, as it isn’t for some people, but it is certainly one of the faster and more certain routes to dual citizenship.
Creating a lifeboat in a home away from home is also workable for digital nomads and for people who get a job where they get paid in US dollars and then turn around and spend it a foreign currency that boasts a favorable exchange rate. Why do you think so many people come to the USA from all over the world? Many come here for the opportunity to earn US dollars, send money home, planning to retire to their home countries to spend their earnings at that favorable exchange rate.
You don’t have to buy a big ranch in another country. Think small. You can rent a room or even a storage unit. But you could buy a condo or a townhouse in some countries for the price you would pay to rent a storage unit or two in the US.
Why Might You Need an Escape Plan?
There are many reasons that even an ordinary person might need an escape plan. Ordinary people find themselves in survival ordeals all the time. The only difference is that most of them never imagined that they would find themselves there, so they are often utterly unprepared. Don’t be that guy.
Legal Troubles
The book, 3 Felonies a Day by Harvey Silvergate, explains that regular folks unknowingly commit multiple federal felonies per day due to vague and sweeping laws. (Silvergate, 2009) He makes a powerful argument that the only thing keeping you out of prison is the fact that you haven’t been prosecuted yet.
Any American could find themselves wishing they had the ability to catch a flight to a non-extradition country where they had cached the means to start over in another country. You don’t have to be Edward Snowdon. It could happen to anybody, and it does all the time. Few other countries have more people in prison per 100K people than the USA, and they are countries like Cuba, El Salvador, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. (Wikipedia, 2025) We can do better than the 5th from the worst in the world.
Legal troubles come in other flavors, too. The last election made Americans painfully aware of lawfare. The targeting of political enemies by the Biden regime was a new low for our nation. Liberals claimed that conservatives were the tyrants, but In Canada, peaceful protestors also had their banks accounts frozen under Trudeau. There are two sides to the January 6th protests in the Capitol as well. One side’s protestor is the other side’s insurrectionist. If the current trend continues, you may be targeted by your government simply for exercising your 1st amendment rights.
Government Troubles
It used to be that Americans only had to worry about being targeted by overzealous prosecutor or LEO. But the government goes after law abiding citizens for all kinds of reasons.
- School Systems – A school system decides to use its considerable resources and power to brainwash and abuse your child or they send the police to door because a teacher saw a BB gun on the wall during virtual class during a pandemic.(Perri, 2020)
- Victim of a “Reliable Informant” – Police departments can raid your home, seize your property and sell it, all on the word of a criminal who says there is pot growing on your homestead because the cops are pressuring him and if he gives up the real bad guys, he’s as good as dead.
- Profiled for Being a “Survivalist” – Many of my readers are now too young to have lived through it, but the Clinton regime waged war against survivalists in the 90’s. That’s how “preppers” came into being, not because of any difference between “prepper” and “survivalists” but because a government propaganda campaign branded survivalists as domestic terrorists. For 20 years there, the word “survivalist” was a pejorative! All the militias disbanded, and nobody was a survivalist anymore. Survivalists had their homes raided and their gun collections displayed in on their front lawns for the news cameras labelled “arsenals”. Entrapment took place and not everybody was lucky enough to be defended by Jerry Spence. History repeats itself. Next time could be far worse. Be ready.
Let’s face it, we live in an age where the government could come after you for any number of reasons.
Escape Criminals
I had the privilege of learning from Jack Luna, author of the bestseller How to Be Invisible and working with him a little bit. (Luna, 2012) One of his clients was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something he shouldn’t have. He witnessed a cartel hit.
That morning, he woke up a normal guy just like everybody else. When he learned he had witnessed a cartel hit he was smart enough to know that he had to disappear. So he went to Jack for help because he had experience hiding from the Franco regime while publishing a pro-democracy newsletter in Spain’s Canary Islands.
Get Your Family Out of Harm’s Way
Whether due to an attack on the USA, a regional or continental disaster, economic collapse, civil war, or some unknown unknown, having a lifeboat property in another country gives the survivor options.
Benefits of Regular Travel Abroad
Foreign travel affords the survivalist benefits, both big and small.
Create Lifeboat Property and a Support Network
Regular travel to foreign countries affords the opportunity to arrange a place to live, accumulate survival necessities, and to build relationships of trust in your home away from home. In researching human migration in response to volatility, relationships were often the key to survival.
You will also have to understand the culture in your home away from home. In South America, bureaucratic problems are resolved by knowing people who know people and by the strength of those relationships. Many of the men in our family in our home aways from home are auto mechanics, and anyone who owns a vehicle knows the value of an honest auto mechanic! If you find one, there are few length to which men would not go to preserve that relationship.
If someone in my wife’s family gets held up on the street and their cellphone stolen, when word gets to the neighborhood crime boss finds out, someone brings the phone back, and that kid is never going to rob them again … after he can walk again. It’s not how things work in our neighborhood in the US, but it’s also more effective than going to the police. The point is that every country has its culture, and you have to understand it if you want to get anything done, whether it’s with the criminals on the street or the bureaucratic criminals in the government. The sooner you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore, the sooner you’ll start getting things done.
Every country is different but use the network that you have. They don’t have to be rich and powerful. No matter who it is, you will never be many degrees of separation from the person you need.
Healthcare
Healthcare is a major benefit of international travel. When I lived in Arizona, I would drive down to the border and walk across, which is a cheap way to visit a foreign country. I noticed many seniors making the trip to access foreign healthcare. Some lived near the border. Others were snowbirds. Still others were bussed to the border! How come?
– Dental Care
– Doctor’s Appointments
– Medical Procedures
– Prescription Meds
Visting a doctor in another country is a great way to stock up on prescription medications. In some countries, and Mexico is one of them, large pharmacies sometimes have a doctor practicing right out of the pharmacy, which simplifies the process of being prescribed medicine and buying it.
Survivalists and preppers in the USA wrestle with stockpiling medications all the time. Anytime you travel outside the US, that is a box you want to check because prescription medicines are easier to get and are far cheaper just about anywhere other than the USA. We pay insanely high prices both to get medical care and to get prescription medications. So, any time you travel outside the USA, check to see if it’s legal and practical to bring back a supply of prescription medications.
In cases where you need expensive dental work or medical procedures, your savings may exceed the travel costs even if you fly to another continent! These big savings may drive busloads of senior citizens across both of our borders for healthcare, but you don’t have to be a senior to save money with foreign healthcare and you can often benefit even if you travel someplace more distant.
Privacy Benefits
Something else I learned from Jack Luna is the privacy benefits that can be had with foreign travel. Having trusted contacts in other countries with a beneficial exchange rate can make it cheap to rent a foreign PO Box. That gives you a foreign address for foreign LLCs, which can, in turn, own real estate and vehicles in the USA.
This can help compartment vehicles from your legal name. If someone runs your plate, they pull up an LLC in a foreign country instead of your home address. That’s often a dead end for an investigation unless it is very well funded.
Your mail should go to a commercial PO box or mail forwarding service instead of to your home too. That helps compartment your mailing address from your residence address, which is owned by another foreign LLC.
There are, of course, many other pieces that go into maintaining any semblance of privacy today, but foreign travel can give you an important piece of the puzzle.
