A Retirement Visa Without a Pension: The Pension-Plan LLC

The cheapest permanent residencies in the world are retirement visas. No investment, no company formation, often permanent status from day one. They have exactly one hurdle, and for most of our clients it is the wrong one: you must document a lifetime pension.

If you were self-employed, exited early, or are simply too young, you are locked out of a door that stands open for a retired civil servant and closed for a successful entrepreneur. Absurd, but that is how the programmes are built.

The answer is not a loophole; it is a structure: your own US LLC awards you a company pension. Lawyer-drafted, documented, apostilled, exactly what immigration authorities want to see.

How it works

Your LLC becomes your pension provider, the way an employer would be. Our lawyers in Austin prepare four documents: the Operating Agreement with an integrated pension plan, the Pension Policy setting the terms, the Board Resolution formally awarding the pension, and the Pension Award Letter confirming the monthly payments.

The LLC then pays you your pension every month. You do not need to build up a payment history before you apply: the pension documents themselves are enough. The SRRV, for instance, is issued on your LLC's pension papers alone, with no months of payments having to run first.

Plainly, because honesty here is cheaper than disappointment: this is real money, and it is yours. You capitalise the LLC and it pays out what you put in. The structure does not manufacture income from nothing; it gives your own capital the legal form of a company pension, and that form is what opens programmes where a brokerage statement for the same amount would be worthless.

You set the amount, based on what you can capitalise and which programmes you are targeting. We tell you the threshold your destination requires before you decide.

What it unlocks

Build it once, use it in many countries, and that is the actual case for the investment:

• •Philippines, SRRV. With documented pension income your deposit halves: ages 40–49 from USD 50,000 to 25,000, and 50+ from USD 30,000 to 15,000. Threshold: USD 800/month, or 1,000 with dependents. → Full SRRV costs
• •Panama, Pensionado. The strongest single argument: permanent residency from the day of approval, no minimum age, no investment, with legally mandated discounts. Threshold: USD 1,000/month plus 250 per dependent. Panama explicitly accepts a pension from a properly registered private company, while investment or rental income does not qualify for this programme. Which is exactly why the form matters more than the sum.
• •The UAE, Switzerland, Turkey, Thailand, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Mauritius and other programmes built on regular pension income.

From experience: every country has its idiosyncrasies. One wants the award worded differently, another an extra confirmation, a third a particular apostille sequence. That is why the package includes individual legal drafting for your destination rather than a template. And when you move on in five years, we adapt the documents instead of rebuilding.

What it costs

USD 6,000, including the legal drafting of every document and the apostilles. It requires a US LLC, which you order in the same checkout; after that the only running cost is the ordinary LLC fees. No annual charge for the pension, no hidden administration.

Measure it against what it replaces: in the Philippines alone it frees USD 25,000 of locked capital, and in Panama it substitutes for programmes that otherwise run into six figures of property or deposits. From the second country onward the question answers itself.

The one mistake you can make

Starting too late. The application does not need a payment history, the pension documents are enough. But the legal drafting and the apostilles have their own lead time: if you want to move in July, you start in spring, not the week before you file. Everything else about it is straightforward.