Growing Your Net Worth with International Investment Funds

To achieve your goals of long-term savings and asset protection, you can utilize professionally managed international investment funds in the offshore centers.

Investment funds are companies that pool capital from many investors and often invest in stocks, bonds or currencies domestically or internationally. An investment fund has a particular mandate or an investment goal such as investing in the U.S. large cap stocks or Asian bonds. The investment funds can be growth, value, sector, country, or region oriented. A portfolio of the investment fund typically contains a large number of securities, offering a variety of choices and diversification to you as an individual investor. As a shareholder in the investment fund, you can participate in the income and capital gains generated by all the fund’s investments.

There are generally four types of investment funds. They are open-end mutual funds, closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and hedge funds. Retail investors typically invest in the first three types of the funds while the more sophisticated investors, such as institutions and high net-worth individuals, invest in the hedge funds.

People are often confused by the terms global investment funds and international investment funds. The former includes investments in the entire world while the latter includes investments in the entire world except those securities located outside of your home residence.

Understanding the Benefits and Risks

Stepping into 2013, investors and savers continue to be concerned about the low economic growth, low interest rates and political fighting in the developed countries. Terms such as fiscal cliff, sovereign debt crisis, hard landing and banking crisis are popping up almost on a daily basis in the newspapers.

Where can you find investments with potential higher returns and lower volatility? The answer lies in international investment funds. In 2012, nine out of the 10 top-performing stock markets in the world are outside of North America or Europe. Due to the higher growth potential of foreign countries and companies, and their better economic fundamentals, international investments can offer attractive longer-term returns. Although international investment funds are typically more volatile than domestic investment funds, adding international investments can further diversify portfolio risks due to their lower correlation with the home country’s investments.

There are additional risks associated with international investing, which can be grouped under sovereign risks. Sovereign risks comprise of currency risks, political risks and market structure risks. Market structure risks typically refer to the inefficiencies of the markets in the areas of corporate governance, shareholders’ protection, accounting standards, transparency of company earnings and bankruptcy procedures. By investing in international investment funds, you can rely on the professional investment managers, who actively do due diligence in these countries and companies and understand the investment risks.

Investing in Offshore Funds in Belize

Being a premier offshore banking center in Central America, Belize not only provides tax benefits to investors but also asset protection. Investment funds set up in Belize generally do not incur taxes on capital gains, dividends or income. There are no exchange controls on offshore mutual funds registered in Belize. At the same time, your investments are protected under the Belize Mutual Funds Act 2000, which regulates the fund’s registration as well as the licensing of the investment managers and administrators. Investing in international investment funds set up in Belize can help your portfolio to grow faster due to the above offshore banking advantages, without sacrificing your investment choices.

Caye Bank

Caye International Bank Limited (CIBL) was granted an Unrestricted "A" Class International Banking License on September 29th, 2003 by the Central Bank of Belize and is regulated by the Central Bank of Belize which set the standards for liquidity and capital adequacy.

Should You Consider Offshore Trusts?

If you are thinking seriously about investing in an offshore trust, then you should put some thought into whether it can really benefit you. If you have assets like real estate, stocks or cash that you don’t need access to for the foreseeable future, putting them into an offshore trust can reduce your taxes substantially. While offshore and domestic trusts work in many of the same key ways, the benefit of choosing offshore is that it is free from government intervention, and it can also add some diversification to your portfolio. Finally, an offshore trust can give you peace of mind about the financial security of your loved ones.

Managing Your Tax Offshore Obligation

As someone who is known to pay a great deal of attention to detail, it only makes sense that you would want to structure your offshore investing accounts so that tracking taxes due would not be a problem. Since you will want to track investment returns and honor your tax offshore obligation to both the country where the account is based and your domestic tax agency, it is important to make sure that the revenue reporting features of those accounts are up to the task. When this is the case, you can easily see how much you owe in taxes for any given period and make sure those payments are made on time every time.

The Benefits of Caye Bank's New Prepaid MasterCard

If you are already banking internationally, retired overseas or just a frequent international traveler, you may be able to take advantage of the benefits of a prepaid MasterCard from Caye Bank. Set for release later this year, this card can be advantageous for a number of reasons. Since MasterCard is accepted in more than 210 countries around the globe, it’s an obvious choice for travelers. Because it is prepaid, it can help to minimize potential losses if lost or stolen overseas, it makes it easier to limit your own spending, and it can even be used to withdraw local currency from ATMs.

What Makes Belize the Best Country for Offshore Investments?

Anyone searching for offshore investments to provide the best in growing wealth and protecting assets needs to look no further than the country of Belize. Belize is renowned worldwide for its international compliance against fraud and is quickly becoming the world’s most respected offshore banking destination.