Hello,
I work for a financial software company and support several Carribbean banks including some in Belize. I haven't checked out any of the links in this thread so this may be redundant, but just thought I'd give a quick caution about banking in Belize. The country doesn't really have a regulatory agency comparable to the FDIC, and while in many ways this isn't a bad thing (FDIC hasn't done a very good job here lately), it makes embezzlement a little easier. That doesn't mean that banking there is totally unsafe (it's not
totally safe here), just that a little more research about choosing a bank (if you even use a bank) may be necessary than it would be in the US.
One of the embezzlement schemes that I caught last year had been going on in that bank for over 10 years and with no audit regulations, it had never been caught. It wasn't very sophisticated, just wasn't looked at because the CEO/CFO wasn't concerned so no one else worried about it. The bank doesn't know how much money exactly they lost. I found $390,000 stolen in 2006. I don't know about laws in the country protecting the bank's customers from loss in this type of instance, but I do know that audits of offages in the bank's general ledger are at the owner/shareholder board's discretion. Considering some of the things that have happened recently in the US with banking though, it may be that having the regulatory laws here just mean that the embezzlers here have to be more sophisticated in their methods (Bernie Madoff comes to mind...)
. If you choose to bank in Belize, I'd check into what loss protection laws they have (comparable to FDIC insurance). Some of the even less sophisticated schemes we've caught have involved bank personnel simply taking funds out of dormant customer accounts and moving it to their own.
That being said, I'd LOVE to go to Belize. In general the people there that I work with (remotely) were really cool and down to earth. The people that I've worked with that were shady embezzlers weren't native to Belize/Caribbean, they were from the US and had moved there to take advantage of the lack of financial regulations. Just wanted to throw out a warning about the financial system to anyone going there.
After working in the financial industry for almost 10 years and seeing the current meltdown... I'm beginning to think my Grandpa has the right idea. He's buried his money all around his land. Says that when he dies he's giving us each a map to our share only.
I'm sure that his cows have probably dug up and ate mine..
I think I'd probably bury my money if I moved to Belize.
lol
