Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner,

speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors

navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading

industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 205th episode of the Financial Advisor's Success podcast. My guest at

today's podcast is Marina Hernandez. Marina is the founder of Swiss American Wealth Advisors, an independent RAA with offices in Philadelphia and Switzerland that specializes in working with cross-border Swiss-American expatriates.

What's unique about Marina, though, is the way her specialized niche allows her to command sizable financial planning fees, working primarily with otherwise hard to work with next generation clients,

while facing remarkably little competition at all, by focusing on not just cross-border expatriate clients,

but specifically those expatriates going just between the U.S. and Switzerland.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what makes the niche of cross-border planning for expatriates so unique and so complex.

The challenges from potential double taxation of foreign country retirement accounts that the U.S. doesn't recognize for favorable tax treatment,

how the rising focus on preventing money laundering and foreign tax cheats has created new layers of specialized

tax reporting that expatriates must handle or face $10,000 fines from the U.S. government.

And why even seemingly simple publicly traded investments to hold a diversified portfolio in a foreign

country can create significant additional U.S. tax challenges.

We also talk about how Marina is structuring her

advisory business, why she chose to break away from an existing advisory firm to start her own

practice. The reason she affiliated with a larger firm, Dynamic Wealth Advisors, to provide her own

back office RIA support and get her access to multiple R.A. platforms. The software tool she

uses to do financial planning with

her ex-patriot clients, and why despite the fact that her value hinges on solving the especially

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