Welcome to Tax Bytes for Expats, the top tax tips you want to know as an expat. The podcast is here to help answer the common queries and concerns expats have when moving to or from Ireland.

Complex taxes explained simply. We'll focus on the Irish and international tax issues to be aware of to ensure you save time, money and stress.

Welcome back, everyone. This is part two of my interview with Mark Westlake, where we'll talk about maximising your pension, diversification and being money savvy in Ireland generally.

If you missed part one, please go back and listen to hear about Mark's background. And thanks for subscribing to the podcast. Now, let's get on with it and jump right in.

Let's go back a little bit because I'm conscious that some of the people listening to this may or may not know anything about pensions.

Okay

Tell me if you talk to a client, what you say to them if they say, you know, tell me about pensions in Ireland. You know, a generic phrase like that, a question like that. Yeah, OK.

So that's a really good question.

So if you think about the way retirement provision is designed to work, and this is true pretty much the world over. You've got a basic level of subsistence protection through the form of social security.

You see it in the US with social security payments. You see it in the UK with national insurance. And you see it in Ireland with PRSI. And that's essentially. You can see a safety net. People describe it as a benefit. Some people don't describe it as a benefit.

There's some distinction about whether, you know, you're entitled to these things, or whether you have to claim them. But broadly speaking, we set aside money. We have done since Beveridge created the state pension in the UK in 1948.

You know, we put money aside at a four-hour old age with a basic state pension. It's ten, eleven thousand pounds a year in the UK. It's twelve thousand a year. It's thirteen thousand a year in Ireland. It's not enough to live on, but it's enough to keep the wolf from the door.

And it gives you a basic subsistence level. What I find really interesting about that is. And the UK. Ireland is a classic example. If you look back over the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years in Ireland,

how many Irish people have spent some time working in the UK and then come back again, and vice versa? Many people, and I'm going to go as much as probably half the people I've met

in the time I've been here, know somebody. It takes it up to 75% of the population now who knows somebody who's worked in the UK. You can top up your UK state pension by paying

voluntary contributions from Ireland in addition to your previous I to top up your Irish state pension. Under current rules, which could change, but under current rules, you're entitled to claim

both. I am one year short of a full UK state pension. That's how old I am. I've been paying my voluntary contributions, £160 a year since 2008. I've bought back all the missing years, and you can do that all the way back to 2005 still. There's a window at the moment which is

closing very soon. Get your skates on on this one. That's an extra £10,000, £11,000 a year of guaranteed state income that you can get from topping up your UK state pension. If you walked

into Irish Life and said, I'm going to give you a cheque. Give me £10,000 a year. How much would I need to give you? It's about €400,000. That's worth to you. Then in addition to that, under the current rules, and they're just about to change in 2025, but under the

current rules, if you rock up in Ireland age 56 and work for 10 years, you'll have paid into the Irish social security system for 10 years, which is enough to get your full

£13,000 a year Irish state pension in addition to your UK £10,000 pension, and you're entitled to claim both of them under current rules. Before we get out of bed, that's where we start, because those are absolutely cast-iron,

easy to understand. There are guaranteed benefits that everybody's entitled to, and everybody's entitled to claim. I fear that having promoted this as a concept for the last few years in Ireland, we're pretty much on the basis now we're probably going to bankrupt the British government, because

everyone I know is taken into the cleaners. But look, them's the rules, right? So I'm not going to say anything, but I think I'm personally responsible for the British government deficit at the moment. So that's the first pillar. And then the second pillar then is

most of us have either an occupational pension at work, and the first thing I would say is if you're moving to Ireland, you're going to have to pay for a pension. And from another jurisdiction, before you sign your employment contract, ask the question,

is there any possibility of putting a discretionary bonus directly into a pension, rather than putting my pay through payroll, paying tax on it, and then me making personal contributions?

And the reason why that makes sense is that an employer's contribution to your pension in Ireland is completely uncapped. If you have a salary of £250,000 a year and a £100,000

a year bonus, as Stephanie said, you're going to pay 52% marginal rate of tax on it. If you just take the £250,000, you're going to pay £250,000 a year. If you just take the salary and put the £100,000 bonus directly straight into your pension, the employer

will save tax at 11% on the payroll, and you'll save 52% tax on it. So it is the most tax-efficient thing you can do, and it's too late. If you've already signed the contract and you come to me and say, I'd like to do that, we'll say, that salary is set to finish, you're changing

your employment contract, you won't be allowed to do it at work. It needs to be before you sign the contract.

That's such a useful point. My simple mind thinks of pensions like this, and this is the way I explain it to my clients. You know, you pay a high rate of pension, you pay a

tax in Ireland as an employee. So put as much as you can into your pension, because your pension grows tax-free. And then when you get to retirement age, when your income has naturally fallen, and you therefore are in a lower tax bracket, you can also take

income from that pension, as well as a lovely little tax-free lump sum. And, you know, oftentimes it's back to your point around, you know, how do you want to spend your money, but equally

potentially accelerating the point at which you can go, you know what, I'm done. I'm leaving employment. Because I've put enough money. So it's smoothing, isn't it? You know, sacrifice now for benefit later, assuming the market performs. And that is a caveat, of course.

Well, it's also, there's a common kind of perception that a pension is for your old age, and that you get it when you're in your 60s and 70s. And when you're in your 20s, that puts you off saving. Because you think, well, I'm not in my 60s and 70s, so I can

do it later, right? So then you get into your 30s, you have a family and a mortgage, and you can't really afford to save. So then you get into your 50s, and you're really struggling to play catch-up, right? So the first rule of thumb with retirement planning is, you've got to be able to save

money. The UK changed the rules a few years back, and I remember distinctly when the rules changed. And it said, anybody under the age of 75 can put money into a pension and get tax relief at source. Even if you've no earned income, you get 2,808 cokes up to 3,600. Remember

the number, 792 in tax relief, that's a 28% guaranteed return on your contribution day one. And I read the legislation, I kept reading it, it kept saying, anybody under the age of 75. So what we started doing was setting up children's pensions for newborns. Because it didn't say you weren't allowed to.

So the grandparents were putting 3,000 a year into a pension for the child who's just been born. And the money was compounding up for 40 or 50 years. So there were precocious little jemimers walking around in the UK now with university degrees that had been paid for

by the pension funds, because I set these things up in the early noughties. Now, the concept there is, start early. Now, I turned 53 years ago, and what did I do? I cracked open my pensions, because I'm allowed to. I took out a tax-free lump sum, and I

paid my mortgage off. And everybody says, what did you do that for? Surely you should be leaving the money in the pension to grow. I said, well, the mortgage rates were going up, and I have a large mortgage, and I have two kids, one in private school, and it's

struggling financially. So do you know what I did? I made my life easier. And do you know what I did? It freed up the mortgage payments to go into pension contributions, which I get tax relief on. So recycling the same money and getting more out.

And I think, you know, I loved corporate finance. I have a master's in accounting. I loved it. But I haven't looked at it for many years. I'm kind of reluctant to say how many. But

the point being this, sometimes I think all of this sounds like double-dutch to people who don't do this. And I love to say to people, this is...

You know, don't get shrouded in darkness with jargon. This is simple. Now, of course, in my mind, I go, right, well, so you've got compounding with a pension. Potentially,

you've got X amount now is worth X amount in, you know, more in so many years to come. You've got to weigh up the repayment of the mortgage against the potential interest or income that

you would earn in the pension. But ultimately, your point there is, well, it's a simple mathematical thing. If I'm willing to... I mean, what suits me now? And of course, you might be

coming in future, but that's not a value to you at that point. So that's very smart. It's a very sensible way to approach it.

Exactly. And I mean, you say we can make it more complicated. I mean, if you actually look at what I actually did, I transferred my UK pension benefits to Ireland, where I left them for 10

years. The HMRC reporting drops away after 10 years, and the UK loses interest in it, and it becomes just a pot of money. And then I said, right, fine, what I'll do then is I'll move that out of Ireland. So I moved that to another EU jurisdiction. Actually, my pension is now sat on

a deck chair on a beach in Malta. And what that aims me to do is I've now a source of offshore income. And I'm Irish resident and non-domicile because my father's not Irish. And therefore, I'm entitled to a source of tax-free

income. So I took money that was tax-relieved in the UK, getting highest margin rate of 40% tax-relief on the contributions. The money grew tax-free from 20, 30, 40 to 50. At 50, I threw it

across to Malta, took my lump sum, paid my mortgage off an island. I've now got my holidays paid for tax-free because I've got an offshore source of income that I wouldn't have otherwise had. So I'm doubling down on that planning.

Does Everlake do much pension transfer work for clients?

Yes. Yeah, we do a lot. Yeah. So the really interesting, and again, you know, again, I'll speak in the first person because I've done it. The rules keep tightening up as you look around

the world on what's acceptable practice and, you know, wherever you take a dim view. So the UK QROPS rules, yeah, since 2017 have got a lot tighter. You need to be out of the UK for 10

years and your pension needs to be now for more than five years for the HMRC. To lose interest in it. That's a bit tricky if you're in your 50s because you probably want the money before that, you know. So these are considerations. And we always ask the question,

should you make the transfer? And if you should make the transfer, when should you make the transfer? So let me give you a classic example. Everybody knows that a defined benefit pension, you know, the gold-plated old-style pensions that, you know, almost nobody has anymore.

Nobody has them anymore. They're so valuable that they used to bankrupt companies. There was a joke in the city of London a few years back that British Airways was a pension company that just flew airplanes as a hobby because they had to pay for the plane. And they had to pay for the plane

and they had a billion, billion pound hole in their pension fund. So they were very focused on fixing that. Boots a few years ago took all the money out of the stock market, just put it in bonds because they said this liability just is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We want to

just cap it. So these things were basically destroying companies. They were so good, right? So everybody knows you've touched that. It'd be bonkers. We just recently did a bit of planning for a lady. She was retiring from IBM and she was offered the pension. It was a fairly

decent pension, 40 or 50 grand a year and a tax freedom sum of 127,000, which was one and a half times final remuneration, which was the maximum she could have. Those rules. And she said, I'm just going to go for this, aren't I? Well, again, like you said,

it's just a bit of maths. Most financial planning is just basic arithmetic. Is there another way you could do this? You're going to get a better outcome. And sure enough, there was. There was a 2.2 million transfer value that we could took over. She has a 71% tax because she's gone over

the 2 million lifetime allowance. We took our fee from that. So revenue subsidized, thank you, Rivik, subsidized our fee to the rate of 71% tax relief, which would have been money she'd have paid away and lost. And we took the transfer value out of the defined benefit pension,

gave her a lump sum of, 500,000 of which 460,000 was tax free and gave her a pension of 80,000 a year guaranteed for life because she didn't need a widow's pension for her husband because he also had a very good pension

of his own. So a little bit of planning that was very, very focused on the client circumstances led to a massively incremental benefit to her relative to the guarantee pension that was on

the table because the guarantee pension and the rules were very, very set in stone and not flexible. So you have the option to take what's given to you or the option to look at whether maybe a bit of planning might make sense to her since it did.

So I suppose my question there would be, is there a requirement to demonstrate bona fides there from the point of view of transferring it offshore for somebody who's staying in Ireland?

So that's a really interesting question. So revenue looked at this in the High Court, in the O'Sullivan case, O'Sullivan versus Kennedy life a few years ago. And we all know about the

free movement of people around the EU from Brexit, right? I've still got a British passport. It doesn't work very well anymore. So we know about that, but there's four pillars of the EU. One is the free movement of capital,

right? So I am free to move my euros to a German bank. I've got money within 26 in Germany. I am free to move my Irish occupational pension to another European jurisdiction under the IOPS

directions, which is the pension regulations. I am free to do that. But bona fides are, it's my money and I'm entitled to do it. Now, wherever you can say you're not entitled to do

it for tax evasion reasons, and my argument would be, well, I'm not doing it for tax evasion reasons. I'm doing it for diversification reasons. I'm doing it for diversification reasons. I'm doing it for financial planning and retirement planning reasons. There's likely to be an election in the

near future. We've seen, how should I say this delicately, populist governments in the UK and the US come in. Ireland's likely to get a populist government with a magic money tree outside Leinster

House, promising all moon and the stick. I'd have some concerns about the finances of the country. It's not inappropriate to put an argument that says, I'd like to diversify some of my wealth

into another European country, given that A, I'm allowed to, and B, it's very prudent to do so. So that's Brown-Phoenix further than you said. And I'd be happy to argue that in court.

Oh, yeah. And I think the thing is, as well, is that it's like anything with a transaction. Many transactions have different components. Tax is usually one consideration. And that's exactly what we've been saying the whole way through, is that whenever you're mounting an argument,

there's a commercial transaction or a transaction being affected for a reason. It's not possible to say in most cases that something's purely been done for tax reasons.

Of course, revenue may argue differently, but that's the point, isn't it? Is that, you know, I just had a call earlier with a founding partner of a new UK company that is

creating an application to Dacium, for anybody who wants to look them up, which will monitor the movements of people and create a very robust log of where people have been. And it's really

down to this concept, which is, you know, it's not what you know, it's what you can prove. And that's a comment that comes up in appeal cases. And, you know, I know barristers quote it when they're recommending how practitioners approach

these slightly unusual situations, because what you're describing, Irish people, and I don't want to sound kind of like as if I'm stereotyping, I feel as if in recent years,

Irish people have become more financially savvy. Oh, totally. Absolutely.

That's a result of the fact of easier access to information, arguably more money in the country,

ability to trade on platforms. I mean, I have shares on my phone in my Revolut account that, you know, I would never previously have been somebody who'd taken interest in something like

that. We've all but become more sophisticated, I think, in terms of accessing information and accessing the ability to do this. You know, for you, that probably means that people realise they

need to be more educated and ask questions when they're in this niche category of not being just

a standard investor. Yeah, I think you need to disaggregate that more sophisticated part into two sections. The world has become more sophisticated,

complex, more global, more intertwined. Artificial intelligence has come along. There's been the availability. You used to have a stockbroker. You used to go and meet a guy with a top hat

on the strand in coots in a black frock coat. And he was your stockbroker because you banked with coots and you banked with coots because the queen banked with coots. I have met people like that. And they talk like this. The reason they talk like this is because you can't get a word to it.

And that is how, you know, the world has always been. And now everyone can have a stockbroking account on their Revolut card. And suddenly that makes us more sophisticated. No, that doesn't make us more sophisticated. That makes the solution and

our access to capital markets easier. But that doesn't mean that we've carried up the knowledge and experience and wisdom that we need to be able to understand how this stuff works.

That's brilliant. Yeah, I really agree with that. That's so true. Yeah. You've paraphrased what I said very well. Actually, I didn't say that. You said it much better. Yeah. So we've opened the door to the sweet shop and we put the seven-year-olds. And guess what?

They're stuffing themselves full of sugary sweets. And we're saying, what are you doing? There's a fruit and veg shop next door. You open the door to the sweet shop. And we're going in and we're going to go and buy Bitcoin, whatever that is,

and speculate with meme stocks and things that we don't really know what we're doing, but everyone else is doing. And the guy on TikTok sounded very plausible.

Let me ask you a question, just even for a laugh. Do you have any NFTs? I think there must be at least a generation between the stuff.

I don't know. I mean, my 13, 14-year-old son calls me a boomer and he enjoys doing it because he loves taunting me because he's already more aware of that digital world than I ever will be.

I mean, the joke I've always said, and I can't believe I actually now do it in my house is, if an electrical item stops working, go and find a 14-year-old to fix it for you. So that generation

that's now being brought up with AI and access to the internet and all of this disintermediation of the old world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And the rise of whatever comes along is going to make the world a smaller place, more integrated place. Some of the saddest things that I've seen recently is Elon Musk taking over Twitter,

for example, which was a free resource of debate and dialogue. And it's been, I don't know what it's turned into. It's turned into a skip fire of whatever he's made into it. Some of these things

are a force for good and some of them are a terrible, terrible power, which is just unleashed on an unready and uneducated or less wise audience. I mean, you see bubbles and manias

throughout history, you know, tulip bulbs in Amsterdam and all of these things, history just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating and, you know, things like Bitcoin and NFTs and meme

stocks for all examples of this, just a new version of the same old story. And you need to have that historical perspective that goes right back over hundreds of years before you're able to

say, we've seen this before. We know how it plays out. We know where that's going to end. You should not be doing these things because they're popular and available at times. There's

an availability heuristic. Things that are put in front of us opportunistically become bright and shiny and flashy, and we want to be interested in them, you know, and it's not, that's not

investing. I don't know what is gambling. It's probably the best example of what people are

doing there. It works for some people until it doesn't. I mean, you could spend an hour talking about that alone. Okay. Look, we've covered a lot. I'm conscious, you know, we're coming up on time.

And I kind of feel like we could probably definitely have another chat. What would you like listeners to take from this episode if they had to kind of distill three key points from what

we've discussed? Oh, that's a great question. So, I mean, we've talked about this before. I mean, having moved from the UK to Ireland myself, if I could tell my, you know, late 30s self who's just

met my now wife skiing in France and decided to sell a house and move to Ireland, if I could do two or three things in preparation, I would say, I would say, I would say, I would say, I would say,

that would have made my life much more comfortable and easier. I would have definitely, definitely listened to that. So, you know, the mistake that we see time and time again is people

will ring up and say, now I've moved my family over from the US or the UK or Australia to Ireland two years ago. And, you know, I've settled in now and I'm ready to get some financial planning

advice. And there's a joke in Ireland, there's a whole joke about how to get to Limerick. And the punchline is you wouldn't want to start from here, right? The place you should have started from was three years ago or four years ago, when you were thinking about

moving from where you were to Ireland. Pick up the phone, get in touch with Steph, get in touch with me and say, I need some financial planning advice. I'm moving from this jurisdiction to this

jurisdiction. That is a life changing event. I probably need some help and guidance from somebody who's done it or is aware of what the issues and the pitfalls are. Can you give me a step plan

about what I need to focus on, where I am, what I need to focus on, where I'm going to, and what are the avoidable traps that everybody makes? And I'll give you a classic example from the UK. I mean, in the UK, individual savings accounts are

very popular. They're tax-free. You can put, you know, £10,000 a year, a husband and wife, put the money in every year. It's fantastic. They've been around since Nigel Lawson did the

first personal equity plan in 1986. I remember it took one hour, right? They were really, really, really popular. They've been really, really fantastic. And they're tax-free in the UK. And people come over and they say, I've still got my ISA in the UK. I said, well, did you not think

to cash it in? It's a tax-free plan in the UK. I said, well, it's tax-free. And I said, no, it's tax-free in the UK. You don't live in the UK. It's not tax-free here. You've just created a massive tax bill for yourself. And they said, well, I've only been here two years. I said, no,

no, the tax bill is for when you bought the investment, not when you moved to Ireland. And they say, well, that doesn't sound fair. I said, when was fairness and tax ever a consideration

or logic and tax? So, you know, that's an absolutely classic schoolboy error that everybody makes. And it's just so avoidable.

And to be honest, this time of the year, it's December, we're always in a rush to help clients kind of just to tidy these things up before the end of the year, because, you know, my line to clients is, you know, you want to have it right by the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. And if

you do, you're happy for that. You know what I mean? So it's there's there is ways to deal with this. But you're right. I hate those calls. I hate the been here two years. And you think, oh, no, what's the news we're going to have to deliver? Yeah, it's never good news. So and the second

thing would be, you know, don't focus on more money being the result. Right. Think of more being the result. So that the finite resource that we all have is not money. It's time.

OK, so, you know, your focus, I think, should be on what is important about money to you. So the question we always ask is what's important about money? And people say, oh, you know, financial independence or some kind of, you know, something like that. And I'll say, well,

what's important about that? And they'll stop and think, oh, I thought that was it. I thought it didn't make any further. And then they'll sort of typically most of us will reflect on something from our past. It's like, what was money like growing up? You know, I grew up in the 80s.

You know, you didn't have a lot of money. Christmas wasn't a great time of year. You know, and what drives us as individuals is what our learned experiences were, our habits about money are learned from sitting on our granny's knee and what was money like growing up.

So I'll ridiculously spoil my children at Christmas. And you think, well, why are you doing that? Because I never had it. And I want a better life for my kids. So you say, well, OK, so that's what's motivating you. So, you know, have you got a will? Oh, no, I don't. Don't make a will.

It's like, so your children are important to you, but like, you think you can live forever? Like, well, you know. So it's just trying to join up those pieces of, you know, what we say people's values about money are more important than how much they've got.

You know, I can work with a set of values. I can't work with a bank account.

I think what you're saying there is the measurement of success in financial planning is, should be happiness, not bank badnesses. That's it. You know, and that sounds, you know, to be honest, sounds a bit cheesy, doesn't it? Because you're kind of like, people think,

well, I need a life coach. You're like, no, no, you need a financial planner who actually helps you achieve what it is with the remaining time you have on this planet. That's it.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I mean, when people ask me at a party what I do for a living, I now just say I'm a financial psychiatrist.

Yeah. I need a session with you.

Why on the couch? Tell me about your relationship with money. Did you say mummy? No, money. I thought you were Dr. Freud.

Dr. Mark Spock.

So, yeah, it is exactly that. It is exactly the happiness. And like I said, financial planning is, you know, making good decisions about your lifestyle, how you live, the way in which you

is your lifestyle sustainable. And sustainable could mean sustainable in a sustainable investment sense and, you know, social responsible investing. Or it could mean, is it sustainable for the whole

of the rest of both your lives if you're married, you know? And those are really difficult things to measure. And, you know, most of us don't have a sense of how you'd go about that. And that's what

good financial planning does. You know, good financial planning is, you know, it's part of its investment, but most of it is actually setting a destination that makes sense and then working

towards it. And, you know, as we're talking about this, it's not having your assets unjustly taken into, you know, estate taxes or, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, bankruptcy or, you know, some predictably avoidable event like death, you know, so things

like life insurance. And it's about having some kind of advanced plan around efficiency and things like taxes in Ireland are really a drag on, you know, making that money go further. So a bit of

tax planning, a bit of estate planning, a bit of investment planning, a bit of financial planning, put it all together. I mean, that's ultimately what people should be doing. And it's not difficult, but again, it's back to my point, you know, the Warren Buffett quote, it's like,

you know, it's simple principles, but it's not easy.

No, it's not. And I think sometimes having that somebody from the outside helping ask those hard questions. I mean, you don't really sit down on a Tuesday afternoon and ask yourself that, do you? You know what I mean? You kind of need that external question.

You do. The one thing that we bring to our clients is that objectivity. You know, it's

what I call the two o'clock in the morning, second bottle of wine question where, you know, if you're in a couple, you sit down and, you know, you've had a good evening and you're sitting down and I say, get out two bits of paper and both write down what you think is the most important

things in your life, right? Then cross off three, see what you're left with and compare your notes and where, where the crossover is. That's what's important to you. That's what's important to the

family. It's what's important to this couple. Those are your priorities. And then look at your finances against that and there'll be gaps. And that's your financial plan.

I think the third is, you know, contact Mark for more help. Yeah. I think, I think, I think you've made the point about education. I think that I know is

you know, knowledge is,

you know, knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. You can get so far with Google, you know, my doctor has a note on a cup in the, in the office

there saying, don't confuse your Google search with my medical degree. You know, it gets you so far, right? But you do need that wisdom. You do need that objectivity. You do need that.

This is a path well tried. We've been here before. You know, everybody says that we're all different. We're not, we're human. We have basic needs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs for sort of shelter, self-actualization.

Comes at the top, but one shelter with basic needs need to be boxed off to feel comfortable and relaxed. And then we can start focusing on the big picture stuff. So yeah. So I think, I think, you know, educate yourself, listen to podcasts, do all that stuff. Definitely. But yeah,

you know, hire professionals when you need to hire professionals, don't try and DIY and do not try and be a DIY investor in Ireland. You will fall on your face. I mean, I've been doing almost nothing

else since I arrived in Ireland in 2008. I've had, you know, articles published in the newspaper. I, certainly I was instrumental in the revenue e-brief coming out around the taxation of offshore

investment funds. I find this difficult. I struggle to keep up to date with all the complexity. There isn't a cat and house challenge. And it doesn't matter what background you come from. A lot of our clients are, you know, they work for Goldman Sachs. They work for the banks. They

work for insurance companies. A client of ours is an actuary. A client of ours is a CEO of an insurance company. We've got clients working for BlackRock. We've got lawyers. We've got accountants. We've got tax consultants. It's difficult. You cannot, you cannot do it justice.

You won't be doing yourself or your family a favor if you try and make this up as you go. Because it's too hard. So yeah, seek timely professional advice. Definitely, definitely.

I think it's that phrase like penny wise, pound foolish. You know, sometimes people balk at fees and, you know, we often say we don't sell time. We sell expertise. There's a difference.

Anyone can give you their time, but expertise is something different. And it's the same with your area. I've really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much. I like it. And I think we've touched on a lot of topics and we'll have to organize another one. With a lot

of people we talk to, we say that we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it. We need to do it again. But I think, you know, a lot of people, particularly those coming from the US, the UK, you know, you mentioned ISIS. We always want to talk to clients from the US who often

have kind of nasty investments lurking in their portfolios that they want to look at before they come to Ireland. You know, in South Africa, there's often unusual trust-based arrangements

that can cause problems. So your clients, I think, are going to find some of the topics we touched on today interesting in any event. No, absolutely. Look, there's a whole bunch

of stuff we didn't touch on. U.S. estate taxes, you know, all of these kind of,

HK stuff, which most people are blissfully unaware of. So, yeah, I mean, really what I'd suggest is for your listeners to get in touch with you with suggested topics, because there's a

handful of things which are, you know, common, common issues and, you know, have a vote on it. And, you know, if we do do another one of these, we'll do it on what people want to hear about. So that's the best way. Know your audience.

To Mark's point, send suggestions to info at expattaxes.ie. Info at expattaxes.ie. And, yeah, we'll collate them and, yeah, we'll do it again soon. Thank you so much.

Great stuff.

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