Self-Employment, Prepping, Offshore Strategies, Diversified Income Streams, and How To Throw a Curve Ball

This is the first blog post on the new E636 Expat Services company based out of the Philippines. Welcome! Thank you for reading our blog.

I started E636 because when I was first getting setup in the Philippines, I ran into a couple of road blogs that were incredibly frustrating. Including trying to setup a corporate structure here for my business and investment activities, trying to open a personal bank account, getting accurate information about immigration processes, and being quoted prices by lawyers or various services companies that were three or four times (or more) what should be charged. Prior to this, I worked in IT for three decades; the slow down in the IT job market in 2024-2025, the hostility towards remote workers, and my desire to be based in the Philippines also pushed me to engage in something outside of IT.

I just came off a three-year period where at any given moment, I was working a minimum of two full-time job equivalents (80-hours per week). For a few weeks in late 2022, I was actually up to the equivalent of three full-time job equivalents. I am self-employed, independent consultant; I have been for most of the past fifteen years. Now, several questions immediately come to mind when someone makes such a claim. Am I serious? Was I actually working that much time? How effective was I in any of these pursuits?

Well, the clients were mostly happy and paid all the invoices. But, the entire experience was slowly gnawing at my soul. I tended to get about three hours of sleep a day and work weekends. I did largely accomplish my primary goals, but it was unpleasant and I don’t want to do that again.

So, why did I do this to myself for several years? Well, several reasons.

1. My divorce was finalized about seven years ago. I walked away from that without much in the way of assets.
2. I needed to rebuild my net worth if I was going to accomplish any of my goals.
3. I wanted/needed to accomplish #2 in a few years, not a decade or more.

So, what are these goals I wanted to accomplish post divorce?

1. For a long-time, I’d been thinking about prepping (supplies, skill sets, etc). The pandemic and empty store shelves really accelerated that thinking. In February, 2020, I was adding a couple extra cans of food to the grocery cart each time I went to the store because I saw what was happening in other places outside the US.

2. I wanted to develop an offshore (Plan B) strategy for my kids and I. This means having permanent residency in a foreign country or better yet a second passport from a foreign country. This includes financial infrastructure (bank account, debit card, ability to transfer money, etc) in this foreign country, proper ID, knowing the language, and a place to live (preferably owned).

3. As I rebuilt my net worth, I wanted to have a more diversified set of assets than I did before—US mutual funds and US real estate is primarily.

4. I wanted to improve my online hygiene and and personal data security. There were many things that I did in my professional life that I wasn’t doing in my personal life. Not good, but I think this has historically been true of many IT professionals.

5. I needed to redo my estate planning and organization of my financial life with an emphasis on #4.

6. As a self-employed person, I need to ensure that I have the appropriate and sufficient infrastructure to continue to run my business. That roughly means power, internet access, and appropriate computer resources—I have some very opinionated requirements for my work laptop. Also, I’m not a big fan of cloud platforms for data storage.

These goals imply some other ancillary goals; I’ve made more progress on some than others. The point of this new blog is to explore what I’ve learned and apply it to building this new expat services company to benefit our potential customers.

Now, let’s immediately get the conclusions out-of-the-way that the most cynical among us will leap to.

• This isn’t about cheating on your taxes. In fact, I strongly frown upon that.
• This is about achieving one’s goals through strictly legal means.
• You’ll find a similar statements in our official disclaimers, of course, but I am not a lawyer, I am not an accountant, I’m just a guy who has done these things before with varying levels of success.
• This site is as much about my journey to educate myself on these topics as it is about what the end result was.

I have lived in the United States and abroad in multiple countries at different points in my life. I’d like to think I have a fairly down-to-earth view of the world, politics, and current events, but I have several EU-based and Southeast-Asia-based firms that I work with for my primary job and the “typical” attitude for an American can vary quite wildly for the typical attitude for a Northern European. One of the founding principals of the united states was suspicion of what the government’s intensions are; my european coworkers are perfectly happy to put faith in their government that the right thing will be done. I also lived in Southeast Asia at various points throughout my life. There are many differences in world outlook, attitude, priorities, expectations and life goals between the average American and the typical Southeast Asian as well. That’s okay. In some future post, maybe we’ll explore those differences.

I am writing this and planning out this website with a westerner’s situation in mind. Though, I can see where a person from Singapore, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and other wealthy Asian nations could also use the information on this site—the details will differ.

I like having flexibility; I like having options. Even in an emergency when the world is going to dog feces, I like to have some semblance of control over what my options are. This is where the prepping movement made sense to me.

That same desire for flexibility and options also led me to the offshore community. By that, I mean the industry, websites, community that attempts to address how to etch out a financial, tax, legal, immigration, and real estate situation that allows one to not be tied to a particular country. Both of these communities have their extreme edges that are best avoided. I don’t usually see the two of them blended together in healthy / productive ways.

For anyone who has made it this far into this blog post and are still looking for advice regarding how to throw a curve ball, you’ve been lied to. There’s nothing here on that topic. I am terrible at baseball and worse at eye-hand coordination. One of my favorite quotes from the X-Files series in the 1990s was:

Scully: Mulder? What are you doing sitting here in the dark?
Mulder: Thinking.
Scully: Thinking about what?
Mulder: Well, the usual. Destiny, fate, how to throw a curve ball. The inextricable relationships in our lives that are neither accidental nor… somehow in our control either.

If you still want information on the curve ball gambit, try this or this.

If you are interested in moving to the Philippines permanently and need help building or implementing your plan, feel free to reach out to us at info@e636.services.com or through the Contact Us page on this site.