| > Are they that expensive to set up? It depends. Usually it isn't the shell company itself per se that is expensive, it is the professional advice to use it to achieve your desired ends that you pay the big bucks for. That said, a run of the mill offshore company in <insert-island-banking-nation-here> runs around $3-5K USD per year in various administrative and filing fees, depending upon your specifics. Slightly less for a US shell company. However. In order to avail yourself of advice for various tax minimization tactics and strategies, and have those tax attorneys nearly indemnify you when the IRS comes a-knockin'...now you're talking percentages of AUM. It isn't the specific consultation fees, though those are fairly healthy. These consultants won't really materially help you when the IRS audits you unless you have been running your entire bookkeeping and CPA book of business through them the entire time. Those fees rack up quickly over the years. Once I worked out their business model and the numbers, it suddenly made sense why the fancy tax minimization strategies were commonly employed only by large companies hiring these folks, large companies with in-house teams like this, or count-the-commas-club UHNWI's. The strategies they shared with me were clever, years later I independently confirmed they would have worked, but I don't have nearly enough FCF to sanely justify using them. |