Does legal tax evasion work for regular people?

The most important thing to understand is that these services don't have your interest in mind and they are out of country, so they can offer you bad advice with no liability on their end (vs. say a CPA). Your problem is not setting up a "free zone company" or whatever that means but getting your current obligations to drop. You do that by visiting your local tax office and telling them you are off the country. It doesn't mean your liabilities disappear overnight.

Your biggest liability (tax-wise) is going to come from your revenue source. That's also where you should be careful. Next, is the country of your passport (because they got you by the **). Everybody else matter very little which is why you should steer away from Dubai, HK, off-shore, etc.. until you understand the nuances of your situation.

Tax avoidance rather than evasion is what you’re after.

Avoid the need to pay in the first place instead of taking evasive action for payments demanded ;-)

I just read the citations you posted. Do you make enough for it to be worth it?

From one of the citations

> The average digital nomad pays $64.76 per day in taxes they do not have to pay - that is over $23.000 per year. Imagine what you could do with all this money. Let us do the paperwork, while you travel the world*

$23K isn’t nothing. But I saved half that much just by moving from a relative low tax cost state (GA) to a state tax free state (FL).

If I lived in a state with higher state taxes and higher cost of living, I would have saved even more.

And anything you do, the first step is giving up your US citizenship since the US taxes worldwide income.

But then you need to have citizenship somewhere else or become “stateless”. From the few countries I looked at, it’s a 3-5 year process.

The US has a relatively strong passport (ranked 9th in the world). You would also have to give that up.

Cypress and Paraguay have strong passports (brought up in your second site).

Edit:

I see you aren’t a US resident. None of what I said applies to you. I’ll keep it up anyway for anyone else thinking about something similar.

An LLC is a pass-through entity, which means you don't pay corporate tax but you pay personal tax on all profits. With an LLC, you can't pay yourself with dividends like a normal company, so it won't count as "foreign sourced income". This means that it's generally a bad solution for paying less tax, as personal tax rates are much higher than corporate.

You should look for countries with low corporate tax that don't tax on dividends.

As far as I can tell these service are essentially the same as not reporting an income in a roundabout way - illegal but you will likely get away with it because how will the tax authorities of your country know.

Do these services provide you with legal representation towards your home country? My guess is probably not.

You should pay a real certified accountant from your country to answer your questions.

No those services won’t be legal. If you stay in Thailand for that period you can pay tax there and then use FEIE to not pay double to the US

Your life should be split like this:

One country for citizenship, one country for residence, one country for your money.

This arrangement earns you a lifetime of peace of mind.