After spending some time in Brazil, it has occurred to me there are several financial advantages for the Brazilian early retiree, as compared to the US person retiring in the US. The US has a comparatively large FIRE movement, whereas Brazil does not, despite it’s advantages. As a US tax resident, I can’t take advantage…

When I first came to Brazil I was very confused buying beef. You see, in the US there are three quality levels of beef mainly available to consumers: Select grade, Choice Grade, and Prime grade beef. You can see the difference is in how much intramuscular fat there is in the cut of beef. The…

In our ongoing Geoarbitrage adventures, we will explore grocery prices in the US verses Brazil by comparing 31 common items. For this study I used HEB as the grocery store in the US. HEB is a fantastic low-to-mid level priced grocery store. I used to use HEB every week when I lived in the US….

Using the Portfolio Withdrawal Calculator, for Brazil I ran some scenarios on the 4% rule over different time periods. I changed time periods and the mix of Ibovespa and Selic to see where the safe withdrawal rate in Brazil breaks down. Let’s take a look. [This is not investing advice. Don’t make financial plans based…

I was looking at the chart of Brazilian economic data since the Real Plan. Here it is: Check out the Selic rate both before and after 2007. Do you see anything? I noticed that is the first point in time the Selic has never exceeded 15%. Interesting… It led me to perform some more analysis….

Tying into the theme of the last post *updated* Are you better off keeping money in Brazil or the US?, which related to keeping cash at the cash rate in either country, what about risk assets? Using 1995-2023 data, let’s see how the Brazilian investor would have done in various assets. Above you can see…

*check out the calculator at the end of this post* * New update: check out the Spoiler Alert section at the end where I calculated every possible combination of years between 1995-2023, allowing for a minimum length of 5 years time and posted a summary of the results* The title is a bit off; my…

For those interested in some of the details of my portfolio allocation, here we go… None of the charts or details that follow involve illiquid assets, such as private stock or real estate. The majority of my investments are in Brazilian assets. Because I spend money in Brazil, I want to avoid the risk of…

Hello friends, The Portfolio Withdrawal Calculator, for Brazil has been updated with a new feature and some fixes. Special thanks to “Investidor Moderado” who posted a comment earlier here which inspired the new feature. While implementing the suggestion, I found some bugs and fixed those too. I also added some notes on the page to…