Retiree Enticement

drtampa

Bronze
Oct 1, 2004
1,087
29
48
New Ulm, TX
Anything new on Leonel's retiree enticement plan?
It was supposed to be introduced in the Senate by Leonel. Is it then referred to committee and then dies a slow death or is action usually taken?
Is there an online copy of the proposes legislation available?
 

Texas Bill

Silver
Feb 11, 2003
2,174
26
0
97
www.texasbill.com
As an interim answer---

I think Leonel has decided that the proposed Income Tax on income above RD$900,000 has effectively cancelled any incentive to have such a law as was proposed.
This move by the Dominican Government was a gimmick to entice foreigners to retire in the DR and they have effectively "cut their own throats" by increasing the "Income Tax" from 28% to 30%.
It will be noted that the propencity of the Dominican Government to be very greedy in their tax proposals is still alive and well.

Texas Bill
 

Texas Bill

Silver
Feb 11, 2003
2,174
26
0
97
www.texasbill.com
Normally----

ANY monies spent in the DR are considered to be INCOME reardless of their source.

It is POSSIBLE that the IRS (US, that is) would consider such a tax as a "deduction" from Gross income in the US, thus reducing your IRS Tax bill.
But, I wouldn't bank on it. The IRS is bound to find some obscure law that would abrogate that deduction.
Needless to say, I don't trust the "Infernal Retribution System"!

Texas Bill
 

gringosabroso

New member
Oct 16, 2004
494
8
0
72
Mexico leads the way! DR does nothing? Yet Again? [long post]

The gringos are moving where the living is easy!

YOU CAN'T really tell you're in Mexico. The menu is in English, so is the music, and seemingly every patron in the place is American?many of them extended families come together to celebrate Thanksgiving. San Miguel, a hillside town three hours north of Mexico City, has long played host to a community of expatriates from the United States, many of whom have chosen to retire there for all or part of the year. Although neither the Mexican government nor the American one keeps statistics on the town's foreign population, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is now growing at a faster pace than ever.
Joannie Barcal of Allende Properties, an estate agent from California, who has lived in the town for 16 years, says that the number of foreigners looking for houses in San Miguel has increased hugely over the past year. It is a comfortable sort of place?one might describe it as the opposite of bohemian. Trinket shops sell silver plates embossed with the logos of Louisiana State University and the University of Texas. The houses bought by foreigners are rarely cheaper than $220,000; several go for over a million every year, Ms Barcal says.
Many of the American settlers barely speak a word of Spanish. They move south not so much in pursuit of the sun, which they could find just as easily in Florida or Arizona, but in a search for a cheaper way of life, along with the sense of community that foreign enclaves generate. Estimates for the number of Americans of non-Mexican ethnicity who have retired to Mexico, mostly in San Miguel and a handful of other towns, hover around 250,000, with at least as many Americans with Mexican roots more widely dispersed. But the house-price boom they and other foreigners, notably Canadians, have created is now driving others even farther south.
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras all offer tax breaks to foreigners seeking to retire there. Beachfront developments catering for pensioners have sprung up along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with a house right on the beach often costing just half what you could expect to pay in San Miguel, smack in the middle of Mexico. Even an influx of a few tens of thousands of American ?senior citizens? can have a big impact on the small economies of the Central American countries. And the numbers could grow even bigger if America agreed to change its public health-care system for those over 65.
At present, Medicare, as the system is called, cannot be claimed abroad. So American pensioners tend to travel back to the United States to get treatment. The possibility of making Medicare ?portable? has been talked about for years. But, apart from the introduction of a small pilot project, it has never got much further than just an idea. Yet the advantages are clear: expatriate pensioners would find it easier to get health care; the costs for the crisis-ridden Medicare would be lessened; and Mexico and other Central American countries with American pensioners would benefit not only from a rise in their health-care expenditure, but also from the big increase in their numbers that such a change would certainly bring. [source: "The Economist" Nov. 25, 2005]
 

gringosabroso

New member
Oct 16, 2004
494
8
0
72
Costa Rica pursues the wealthy retiree! The DR? Lost & last again! [long post]

Developing Nations Lure Retirees, Raising Idea of 'Outsourcing'
Boomers' Golden Years

By JOEL MILLMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 14, 2005; Page A2

SAN JOS?, Costa Rica -- The aisles are packed on a Sunday afternoon at the Escaz? branch of the PriceSmart warehouse-store chain, one of four mammoth outlets the San Diego retailer has opened in this Central American capital. Most of the shoppers filling their carts with Prego spaghetti sauce, Gorton's fish sticks and Pringles potato chips aren't upwardly mobile Latinos, though -- they are retired Americans, part of a large cadre of foreign-born pensionados, who have settled here in the past 20 years.
Costa Ricans like to say theirs is the only country in Latin American, and perhaps the world, boasting a greater number of Americans -- as many as 20,000 retirees are here from the U.S. and Canada -- than the number of its own ?migr?s abroad. That may be a stretch, since it requires counting some of the 1.4 million tourists who come here each year, an average of 30,000 Americans on any given week. Yet it gets at an important economic phenomenon.
Thanks to a decades-old policy of offering tax incentives and other perks to attract English-speaking retirees, Costa Rica has pioneered what is fast becoming a popular economic-development tool for the small, largely impoverished nations of the Caribbean basin: importing a high-spending consumer class unencumbered by school-age children, with the expectation that their dollars will quickly follow.
In Costa Rica's case, retirees contribute significantly to the $1.4 billion a year in direct spending by Americans here, the government says. (It doesn't differentiate between retirees and long-term visitors.) The multiplier effects -- salaries in health care, construction, retail and other services -- could bring the total benefit to $4 billion, nearly 25% of Costa Rica's gross domestic product. Moreover, the retirement wave is synergistic: early pensionados invested in second careers -- running bed-and-breakfast hotels near the beach, or operating travel agencies -- which attracted more tourists and more retirees.
With the prospect of more than 30 million Americans starting to retire next year, many developing countries expect a windfall. Which raises the question: Should the U.S. "outsource" baby boomers' golden years?
Consider one cost of retirement: labor. The U.S. depends heavily on immigrants to serve retirees, in the many kinds of services they need. According to the 2000 Census, more than one million U.S. hospital, nursing-home and other health-care workers were born abroad; nearly 350,000 of them are immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Sending U.S. retirees abroad represents one step toward closing that intractable labor gap.
Foreign retirement is becoming quite the norm elsewhere. In Europe, more than a million German, Scandinavian, Dutch and British citizens live most of the year far from home -- mainly near the Mediterranean coasts of Italy, Spain and Greece. Those retirees and their hosts enjoy the benefits of a "superstate" joining their nations under the European Union; retirees don't require visas to resettle, and their insurance, pensions and bank accounts are portable across borders. Last year in Southeast Asia, Malaysia launched its "My Second Home" program aimed at attracting rich retirees from Hong Kong. Applicants are allowed to bring one maid.
None of those benefits are available yet in this hemisphere, but demand for foreign retirement havens is rising. Today, Costa Rica allows U.S. citizens registered under its pensionado system to pay into the country's social-security system, for as little as $37 a month, qualifying for full hospitalization and pharmacy coverage. Most expatriate retirees here use the local public-health administration as a backup for emergency care and rely on private clinics for most care.
In fact, the retirees' market is so good for Costa Rica that the country has dropped some of the incentives it first used to lure retirees in the 1970s and 1980s -- such as allowing them to import a car duty-free -- and is considering raising the minimum income a foreigner must have in order to live here to $1,000 a month from $600. The country also is encouraging retirees to seek residency as "investors," a requirement satisfied by the purchase of a vacation home or small business with a value of at least $150,000. It is a lure that resonates with U.S. retirees priced out of the vacation market at home.
"We're seeing only the tip of the iceberg," says Alberto Kader, a real-estate developer who specializes in high-end second homes for American buyers. "The market for $1 million-plus homes is already pretty big. The market for $100,000-plus homes is going to be humongous."
Panama, Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua also are actively courting American retirees, mainly by offering tax-free status to anyone willing to buy or build a house there. It hasn't always gone smoothly in the region. In Mexico's Baja peninsula a few years ago, scores of U.S. retirees learned that deeds on their beachfront property didn't meet certain provisions of a national-security statute that, technically, permits only citizens to own land on Mexico's two coasts. In Costa Rica, the amount of seacoast real estate now in foreign hands -- by some estimates 83% of all developed property -- has become a political issue. So has crime, with growing concern that rich expatriates from North America are attracting poor expatriates from Nicaragua who prey on elderly homeowners, as well as their Costa Rican neighbors.
Beyond those issues, there is a more elemental question: Is courting retirees something poor countries can afford to do?
"It takes a lot more than real estate," warns T?mas Engler, a Panamanian with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington who specializes in the hemisphere's aging issues. The biggest obstacle countries of the Caribbean will face will be providing health services, he says, and few may have the means to compete. "It took between 10 and 15 years for Costa Rica to strengthen its private health-care network after the retirees started coming," Dr. Engler says, despite the excellent public-health system Costa Rica already had in place. Some parts of Panama now may be able to serve U.S. retirees, he adds, but places such as Honduras or Nicaragua are going to require huge investments.
In the 1980s, Dr. Engler tried to persuade U.S.-based providers of long-term care to establish nursing homes in Caribbean and Latin American countries for retired Americans, as a way to facilitate the return of health-care workers who have emigrated to the U.S. The idea still has merit, he says, but would require U.S. insurance plans to be accessible abroad. In 2001, the U.S. Congress took a step toward facilitating retirement overseas when it authorized Tricare, the health-maintenance organization for retired members of the military, to process claims of veterans retiring abroad. Medicare, the health insurance carried by most seniors, doesn't recognize claims for U.S. citizens retiring overseas.
Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com

[I]My honest question, addressed to any Ex-Pat, from any country, who has been living in the DR for 5 years or more: can you remember when the DR government did anything whatsoever to make adjusting to DR life any easier for any aging Ex-Pat? "Anything whatsoever"? What? When? Why not? Please share your positive experiences with us. Thank you.[/I]:cry:
 

Texas Bill

Silver
Feb 11, 2003
2,174
26
0
97
www.texasbill.com
Want the source document---

gringosobraso---

Would it be possible to post the reference to the source document?? I'd sure like to copy and paste, but can't be done on DR1 that I know of.

I'd like to send a copy to Leonel for his info. Also, it'd make good copy to send to the various periodicals here in the DR. if nothing else than to show the public how much their Legislator's are missing the boat by not doing the same.

Send mea PM with the blue underlie stuff.


Texas Bill
 

CaliforniaGeorge

New member
Nov 20, 2005
26
0
0
yes you can cut and paste

I just cut and pasted the post below as it appears that this information from Mr. Guzman does qualify as evidence of enticement to retirees:




#29 Today, 06:24 AM
Fabio J. Guzman
DR1 Expert Join Date: Jan 2002
Posts: 860



Pensions and Social Security benefits from abroad are in fact exempt from the provisions of Article 269 of the Tax Code. Article 2 of the Regulations for the Aplication of Title II of the Tax Code (Reglamento #139-98) lists what is meant by ?inversiones y ganancias financieras?. Pensions and Social Security are not included in the list.
 

abe

New member
Jan 2, 2002
522
35
0
Nicaragua

Just got back from a short exploratory trip to Nicaragua and will acknowledge that the folks are as warm and nice as Dominicans, but my most delightful observation can be summed up in two words: few motorbikes.

I was in Granada, the colonial city, and in San Juan del Sur, the current focus of retirement home construction and promotion. Granada is so popular that any colonial homes that are not astronomically priced are outside the city.

SJDS is a fishing village poised to blossom, but the home sites north and south of it are not easily accessed due to primitive roads and long rainy seasons. That isn't stopping boomers from buying though.

RE: incentives, I am beginning to look into that, but currently believe that it is a welcoming environment and that the government is going to do what it can to attract gringos. Panama is the model and, depending on the election results in Nicaragua in November, the scope of Nicaragua's expansion will either widen or narrow quite dramatically from all that I have read.

The Sandinista party is surprisingly strong once again, and even though it's not the same Sandinistas of old, perception is everything; if they win, I have read that the US has already stated through a Deputy Sec. of State that US aid will stop. That should be enough to scare US citizens out of buying there, but who knows.

At the moment, I am only marginally informed and, of course, DR1 is not about NIcaragua. But the point is that Central America is anxious to attract anyone that the DR government manages to alienate by not providing them with retirement incentives.