A country-by-country reference guide to offshore banking, entity structuring, and expatriate tax planning, built around Barber's personal ranked list of seven havens. It reads more like a phone book with opinions than a system, and its most quotable numbers are already stale.
The one idea
The book's actual idea is simple: move your banking, your business income, and eventually yourself outside the United States, and you convert a taxable, exposed position into a private, protected one. Barber frames this as three escalating steps: open offshore bank and investment accounts first, then set up an offshore corporation or trust to hold assets and route income, then physically relocate if you want the biggest prize, the foreign earned income exclusion.
The centerpiece is his 'T-7' list, seven jurisdictions he ranks as the world's best money and tax havens: Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria as banking centers, and Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Belize, and Hong Kong as tax and business havens. He picked them using twelve criteria he lays out explicitly: tax structure, political and economic stability, exchange controls, treaties, government attitude, corporation laws, communications and transport, banking and professional services, legal system, secrecy, investment incentives, and location.
Underneath the country profiles sits a genuinely useful piece of tax law: the section 911 foreign earned income exclusion, which in the edition reviewed let a U.S. citizen earn up to $80,000 a year tax-free by living abroad, doubling to $160,000 for a married couple who both qualify. Barber spells out the two ways to prove it (bona fide residence for a full tax year, or physical presence outside the U.S. for 330 of 365 days) and the paperwork trail (IRS Form 2555) that supports the claim.
What it actually teaches
Barber's plan for going offshore unfolds in a rough sequence, from safest to most drastic.
MOVE THE MONEY FIRST
Open offshore bank and brokerage accounts before doing anything else. This step alone, he argues, buys privacy and currency diversification without requiring you to leave the country or change your tax filing.
STAND UP AN OFFSHORE ENTITY
Form an international business company (IBC) or asset protection trust in a no-tax jurisdiction such as Nevis, Belize, or Panama. He lists the IBC's typical features: one shareholder and one director minimum, no annual financial filings required, no local tax on income earned outside the host country, and in some jurisdictions a government-guaranteed tax holiday running 20 to 50 years.
PICK THE HAVEN AGAINST HIS TWELVE FACTORS
Score any candidate jurisdiction against the twelve criteria (tax structure, stability, exchange controls, treaties, government attitude, corporation law, infrastructure, services, legal system, secrecy, incentives, location) and cross-check it against whether it has signed a Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) with the United States. None of his T-7 countries had signed one as of the edition reviewed, which he treats as the deciding factor in their favor.
MOVE YOUR INCOME, THEN YOURSELF
Shift earning activity into the offshore corporation, then relocate physically if the goal is the full $80,000 (or $160,000 per couple) foreign earned income exclusion under IRC section 911. Qualify by either the bona fide residence test (a full tax year abroad) or the physical presence test (330 of 365 days outside the U.S.), and document it with a lease, local bank account, employment contract, and Form 2555 filed with your U.S. return.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader who actually acts on this book doesn't open a Swiss account Monday morning: the realistic first move is verifying which of Barber's claims are still true. Every one of his headline facts, the TIEA status of his T-7 countries, the $80,000 exclusion figure, the Austrian anonymous passbook accounts he describes as already eliminated by the time of writing, has moved since 2007. The useful output of a Monday read isn't a haven pick, it's a checklist of which specific claims to re-verify with a current CPA and immigration attorney before spending a dollar.
The one piece that ages well as a mental model rather than a fact sheet is the twelve-factor evaluation checklist in chapter 16. That's usable today for screening any jurisdiction, offshore or not, precisely because it's a list of questions to ask rather than a set of answers that expire.
| Rank | Country | Type | TIEA with U.S. signed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Switzerland | Money/banking haven | No |
| 2 | Liechtenstein | Money/banking haven | No |
| 3 | Austria | Money/banking haven | No |
| 4 | Panama | Tax and business haven | No |
| 5 | Saint Kitts and Nevis | Tax and business haven | No |
| 6 | Belize | Tax and business haven | No |
| 7 | Hong Kong | Tax and business haven | No |
Every one of these TIEA statuses has since changed under the OECD Common Reporting Standard and FATCA; treat the ranking as a 2006 snapshot, not current guidance.
If only we could take away the taxman's guns.Hoyt Barber, Tax Havens Today
Where it fails
- The signature number is nearly two decades stale. The $80,000 foreign earned income exclusion Barber builds an entire chapter around (IRC section 911) was raised by Congress starting in 2006 and has been indexed for inflation every year since; by the mid-2020s the exclusion sits well above $120,000. A reader who quotes Barber's figure to a tax preparer today is working from a number the law itself has already replaced.
- Half the T-7 list has changed status since publication. Barber's entire ranking rests on which countries had not signed a Tax Information Exchange Agreement with the U.S. as of 2006. The OECD's global push for automatic information exchange (the Common Reporting Standard, adopted from 2014 onward) overtook this framework almost entirely; Switzerland itself began sharing account data with U.S. tax authorities under FATCA in 2014. The secrecy advantage the T-7 is ranked on largely no longer exists in the form described.
- The book assumes a level of capital and professional access it never states. Nowhere does Barber give a minimum account size, an entity formation budget, or an ongoing maintenance cost beyond a passing note that Bermuda and Switzerland carry 'relatively hefty' incorporation fees. A reader with a few thousand dollars and no attorney gets the same pitch as a reader who can retain Barber Financial Advisors directly, which the book repeatedly points readers toward.
- It's a directory dressed as a strategy book. Roughly two-thirds of the page count (Parts Three and Four, pages 121 through 316 in the edition reviewed) is country-by-country profiles and contact listings for banks, attorneys, and mail-drop services. The actual method, the twelve-factor selection process and the T-7 ranking, is contained in about 15 pages (chapters 15 and 16). Buyers looking for a system are paying for a reference directory that happens to have a short strategy chapter attached.
- No downside case studies, only warnings in the abstract. Barber names jurisdictions that collapsed as havens, the Bahamas, the Caymans, Nauru, but never walks through what happened to an actual account holder caught in one of those failures. The book explains regulatory risk in general terms and moves on; there's no worked example of someone who followed this exact playbook and lost money, time, or freedom because a haven's status changed.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You're a U.S. citizen seriously exploring expatriation or offshore entity structuring and want a starting map of jurisdictions, terminology (IBC, APT, TIEA), and the shape of the section 911 exclusion, with the understanding that every number and treaty status needs re-verification with a current professional before you act.
Skip it if
You're looking for a trading or investing edge, want current, actionable tax figures, or need case law and enforcement examples rather than country profiles. Anyone expecting a step-by-step legal playbook rather than a reference directory with a short strategy chapter bolted on will find this thin.
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