Off-Topic: Do Not Put Hope in Politics - How to Become Immune
Warning before someone pretends not to understand: this is personal opinion. This is not financial, legal, tax, electoral, marital, spiritual advice, or a recipe. The details here are Brazil-specific. If you are going to touch companies, assets, taxes, marriage, inheritance, tax residency, or anything that can wreck your life, talk to a real accountant and a real lawyer. Not me. Not an influencer. Not a Twitter thread.
Brazilian elections are coming and the internet has already turned into a stadium.
Red shirt on one side. Yellow shirt on the other. In the middle, adults behaving as if an election were a championship final. They scream, insult, paste stickers, share convenient clips, call relatives stupid on WhatsApp, then think they are “participating in democracy.”
Big deal.
After 50 years watching this movie, my recommendation is simple: stop cheering. Politics is not your father. A party is not your family. The State is not a shield. An election is not a life plan.
I am not telling you to become alienated. Read the news. Understand risk. Vote if you want to vote. I vote. Just do not hand your sanity to this. Your daily anxiety, your huge rant, your fight in the family group chat, and your individual vote will not fix a structure built over decades.
They will not.
If things improve, great. But plan as if they will not.
Politics became soccer
Brazilians understand team loyalty very well. Corinthians, Palmeiras, Flamengo, São Paulo. Your team loses, hires badly, piles up debt, drops to second division, and you stay. Because it is identity. Shirt. Tribe.
The problem is carrying that brain into politics.
In soccer, fine. It is entertainment. In politics, it becomes organized stupidity. The person does not defend a public policy. They defend a crest. They do not change their mind when bad numbers appear. They double down. They do not want to understand debt, taxes, inflation, exchange rate, pensions, productivity, education, legal certainty. They want to know whether “my side” won.
That is useless.
Worse: it makes you vulnerable. Because you start planning your life on top of hope.
“Now it will work.”
“This time it changes.”
“If this person wins, it gets better.”
“If this person loses, it is over.”
Stop.
Plan like an adult. Your plan needs to work with any president, any Congress, any finance minister, any new madness invented in Brasília.
The bill always arrives
Brazil has high debt, high public spending, high taxes, bad services, and too many rules. No election deletes that by decree.
According to the Central Bank, gross general government debt ended 2025 at 78.7% of GDP, near R$ 10 trillion. You can argue methodology, IMF criteria, Treasury bonds in the Central Bank’s portfolio, whatever you want. Do it if you enjoy the subject. The practical point remains: the bill is big.
When the State spends more than it collects for too long, the bill appears somewhere. It appears in taxes. It appears in interest rates. It appears in inflation. It appears in weak currency. It appears in bad service. It appears in bureaucracy. It appears in investment that never came.
Populism is seductive because it promises a benefit now and sends the bill to later. But “later” arrives. It arrives as IPCA. It arrives as a more expensive dollar. It arrives as high interest rates. It arrives as wages that do not follow the cost of living.
A common confusion: saying inflation is “caused by price increases.” That reverses cause and consequence. The Central Bank defines inflation as an increase in prices and a loss of purchasing power. That is how inflation appears. The root, when inflation is persistent and spread through the economy, involves money, credit, demand, expectations, and fiscal conditions. The Cleveland Fed explains the long-term relation between money growth and the price level. The IMF calls one extreme case fiscal dominance: when debt and deficits start bossing monetary policy around.
Supermarket prices going up are a symptom. Not the root.
Of course one product can go up because of oil, bad harvest, war, exchange rate, tax, cartel, logistics. But localized abuse does not explain decades of generalized purchasing-power loss. Turning companies into scapegoats is convenient for politicians. Convenient does not mean true.
Over the last 20 years, according to the Central Bank’s SGS data, accumulated IPCA from July 2006 to May 2026 was near 197%. Prices almost tripled. The PTAX sell rate went from roughly R$ 2.16 per dollar on 2006-06-30 to roughly R$ 5.18 on 2026-06-30. The Real buys a lot fewer dollars.
You do not need sophisticated theory. Just remember what groceries, a car, rent, school, or health insurance used to cost.
Brazil will not become Switzerland in four years
Another fantasy: “now public services will improve.”
I hope so. Seriously. I hope they improve. But I would not plan my life betting on it.
Public health care? If you depend on it, I honestly hope you are well served. But I would not build my family plan around a miracle. ANS counted around 52.9 million beneficiaries in private medical-hospital plans in March 2026. The 2022 Census measured Brazil at 203.1 million people. Most people depend directly or indirectly on SUS and public infrastructure.
When the system fails, it fails on real people. G1 reported in June 2026 the case of Vilmar Pereira da Silva, 49, who died in a waiting room at a UPA in Brasília. It also reported in Sorocaba the death of a 14-year-old boy who, according to the family, waited 18 hours at a UPA. I am not using two cases as a national statistic. I am reminding you that abstraction becomes a body when things go wrong.
Public education? If you have kids, be brutally honest: do you want to bet 15 years of their education waiting for an educational revolution that may never come?
In PISA 2022, Brazil scored 379 in math, 410 in reading, and 403 in science, against OECD averages of 472, 476, and 485. That is not an ideological detail. That is weak foundation.
I know most people cannot pay for private health care and private school. That is exactly the problem. The country is expensive, public service is bad, and the private alternative is also expensive.
Denying reality does not improve reality.
I saw money melt
I grew up in the 80s. I saw hyperinflation. Prices changed the same day. Money melted in your hand. Families had to do survival math. Then came Collor and the savings confiscation.
For young people, that sounds like ancient history. For me it is memory.
Hyperinflation does not fall from the sky. It is not divine punishment. It usually starts with a government spending more than it can, debt nobody wants to face, and the temptation to cover the hole by printing money. Looks clever for five minutes. Then it becomes an invisible tax on everybody.
But even in chaos, some people make money. Not because they are more virtuous. Because they understand the mechanics.
Think of a simple store. It receives cash today and pays the supplier in 30 days. If it buys Cr$ 1 million in inventory and only pays the supplier next month, with 30% monthly inflation, that Cr$ 1 million paid later buys much less. Meanwhile, it sells the inventory at adjusted prices. The customer thinks the merchant got rich because “prices went up.” Sometimes the merchant merely survived the interval. Sometimes he made a lot in the interval.
Now think about money sitting for a few days. A company receives payment slips on day 5 and pays payroll on day 30. If Cr$ 10 million stays in the cash account for 25 days and overnight yields close to 1% per day, that becomes roughly Cr$ 12.8 million before payroll. Payroll’s nominal amount is still there. The gain came from time. From float.
Banks did this at a much larger scale. They captured money paying one rate, lent or invested it charging another, and turned huge volumes every day. If the difference looked small, a few points per month, on billions it became a fortune. Spread and float. Ugly names for something simple: whoever received before paying, and knew where to park the money in the middle, won. Whoever received a salary at the end of the month and ran to the supermarket lost.
And it did not have to be a bank. An organized individual could also play a better game. If he knows the currency is melting, he does not leave everything sitting in cruzeiros waiting for it to turn into dust. He buys dollars when he can. He buys shares of exporters that earn in dollars. He uses futures or options to hedge, not to play casino. Simple example: you have money you will only use in 30 days. If you leave it in rotten currency, you lose. If you buy dollar protection and the exchange rate explodes, you did not “get rich by luck.” You understood the game earlier. Of course: options, forex, and leverage break amateurs faster than inflation. This is not a recommendation to play trader. It is just the obvious point: financial knowledge turns chaos into opportunity. Ignorance turns salary into dust.
That is why inflation destroys the poor and the disorganized first. Whoever lives on a fixed salary arrives late to the race. Whoever understands payment terms, inventory, debt, cash, and currency plays another game.
That was the environment where the Collor Plan arrived. To try to control hyperinflation by force, the government did something brutal: it forcibly removed liquidity from people’s hands. The Senate summarizes it: MP 168/1990 blocked, for 18 months, amounts above NCz$ 50 thousand in accounts, savings, and financial investments. In practice, families and companies woke up with their own money locked by the State. Decades later, Collor returned to politics and served as senator for Alagoas.
This is a lesson Brazilians should tattoo on their foreheads: do not wait for “justice” to come. Do not expect the people who destroyed lives to pay proportionally. Do not expect the system to recognize your effort and protect you.
The system protects the system.
You protect you.
Stop outsourcing your life
Your plan cannot depend on an election.
If I had to summarize my strategy, it would be something like this:
- learn real English;
- build a profession you can sell outside Brazil;
- understand taxes and accounting;
- protect assets legally;
- raise children without depending on the State, if that is possible for you;
- know competent people in areas you do not dominate.
None of this is sexy. It does not make a slogan. It does not go viral.
It works better than hope.
English and dollars are not fetishes
English is not a differentiator. It is oxygen.
There is a reason this was one of the first videos on my channel: Akitando #32 - Como eu aprendi inglês e entendendo padrões.
Not every Brazilian profession is exportable. Programming is one of the ones that are. Even with a harder remote market, layoffs, global competition, and AI messing everything up, there is still a path. It is not easy. It never was. It only looked easy during the bubble.
You start local. Gain experience. Study more than the others. Learn to communicate. Improve your English. Apply abroad. Get rejected. Apply again. Continue.
This is not a six-month plan. It is a decades-long plan.
The goal is simple: increase your chance of being paid in hard currency.
Why dollars? Because the dollar is still the center of the international financial system. This is not cheering for the US. It is mechanics. After Bretton Woods, and even after the end of gold convertibility in 1971, the dollar remained the main currency for reserves, trade, debt, and liquidity. The BIS shows that the dollar is involved in almost 90% of global FX transactions and appears in about half of global trade invoiced in foreign currency.
In the 80s, the Plaza Accord coordinated a devaluation of the dollar against currencies like the yen and the Deutsche mark. FOMC materials from 1985 already recorded the dollar roughly 14% lower against the yen weeks later. This is not a childish “US imperialism” story. It is currency, interest rates, trade, geopolitics, and debt.
When a geopolitical crisis raises oil prices, importing countries need more dollars to buy energy. Reuters showed this during the Iran-US war: the dollar rose on safe-haven demand, higher oil prices, and Strait of Hormuz risk. Sanctions and alternatives exist, but that does not prove the end of the dollar. It proves the opposite: everyone needs to work around the dominant network precisely because it is dominant.
You do not need to like it. You need to understand it.
The Real is not a good long-term store of value. If you can keep part of your income, assets, or client base in hard currency, you become less vulnerable. Simple as that.
Taxes are part of adulthood
Brazilian salaried CLT workers often think they understand taxes because they open the Federal Revenue program once a year and click “next.”
They do not.
It looks simple because the hard part is hidden. The company pays a mountain before your net salary appears. Then you pay income tax, contributions, taxes embedded in products, services, consumption, property, notary fees, capital gains, inheritance.
The Federal Revenue estimated the tax burden at 32.3% of GDP in 2023. The last comparable World Bank Doing Business report put a standard Brazilian company at 1,501 hours per year just to comply with tax obligations. The report was discontinued, so do not use it as a current ranking. Use it as a picture of the monster’s size.
And most people do not know the difference between income, assets, capital gains, pro-labore, dividends, declared offshore, evasion, lawful avoidance, tax residency, holding company, probate, ITCMD, IRPF, IRPJ, ISS, ICMS, PIS, Cofins.
They mix everything.
Offshore is not automatically tax evasion. It can be illegal if used to hide assets, omit income, defraud creditors, or launder money. But an international structure that is declared, has identified beneficial owners, correct accounting, and taxes paid under the applicable law is not a crime by definition. You can find it ugly. You can find it unfair. Just do not call everything by the wrong name.
In practice, what matters is obeying the real law, not repeating internet memes.
You buy property. Years later, you sell for more nominal reais. It looks like profit. Sometimes it is just inflation. Even so, if there is taxable capital gain under the fiscal rule, the government taxes the nominal difference according to the applicable rules.
Simplified example: you bought a house for R$ 500 thousand in 2006. Sold it in 2026 for R$ 1.2 million. It looks like a R$ 700 thousand gain. With accumulated IPCA near 197%, that house would need to be worth around R$ 1.485 million just to preserve purchasing power. Before tax, you already lost in real terms.
On paper, “profit.” In real life, loss.
You die. Your heirs discover probate, notary offices, lawyers, ITCMD, deadlines, family conflict, and cost.
I am not saying every family needs a holding company. I am saying you need to know how to do the math before someone dies, not after.
Assets need structure
This is where many people misunderstand on purpose.
I am not saying to hide assets. I am not saying to evade taxes. I am not saying to defraud creditors. I am not saying to transfer assets after being sued to try to escape enforcement. That is illegal, voidable, and stupid.
I am saying to study estate and asset planning before buying big things on impulse.
A holding company, patrimonial company, corporate structure, will, insurance, private pension, international account, or declared offshore can make sense. It depends on the case.
“It depends on the case” is the most important sentence. Do not copy an influencer’s structure. Do not open a company in the Bahamas because you saw a video. Consult a professional.
A good holding company is not tax magic. It may have ITBI, capital gains, annual cost, accounting, ancillary obligations, anti-abuse rules, and piercing risk if you make a mess. It does not make assets immune to creditors, enforcement, division, or fraud against creditors.
It only replaces improvisation with governance.
The principle is simple: everything directly under your CPF is exposed to your CPF. Lawsuits, divorce, probate, family disputes, tax mistakes, corporate confusion, debt, accidents. A legitimate structure organizes risk, succession, administration, and tax within the law.
The important thing is not improvising assets when it is already too late.
Marriage, children, and contracts
Marriage is love, of course. Before the State, it is also a contract.
A bad contract destroys assets, family, and peace.
Brazil has property regimes. Partial community, universal community, conventional separation, mandatory separation in some cases, final participation in aquestos. Many people marry without understanding any of this.
I consider total separation of assets the most respectful way to marry.
Not because you love less. The opposite: because you do not need to financially trap the other person to prove love. Each person keeps clarity about what is theirs, what belongs to the other, and what is built together by explicit decision.
This does not prevent generosity. It does not prevent buying things together. It does not prevent building a life in common. It only avoids pretending affection replaces accounting.
And children?
If you can choose, have children when you can pay for private health care and education.
I know that sentence irritates people. Better to be irritated now than to discover too late that the State will not deliver what you imagined.
A child is not an adult accessory. Not an Instagram project. Not “we will figure it out later.”
If you want children, plan. Health insurance, school, housing, savings, language, safety, time, family nearby. If you cannot yet, work so you can.
Optionality
Do not leave your life hanging from a single point of failure.
One currency. One bank. One employer. One country. One expired document. One platform that can ban you. One broker that can freeze. One income source that can disappear.
That is fragility disguised as simplicity.
Having a valid passport, a visa when it makes sense, a declared international account, reserves in hard currency, a resume sellable abroad, contacts outside your bubble, and the ability to work remotely does not mean you are leaving tomorrow. It means you can choose.
No government needs to persecute you to destroy your life. Sometimes it is enough to change a rule, freeze an account, raise a tax, delay a document, or slowly corrode the currency.
Whoever has one option obeys.
Whoever has several options negotiates.
Every programmer understands backup. Back up your own life.
So why not leave?
Leave, if you want and can. There is nothing wrong with emigrating.
But do not treat it as a moral obligation. Many people have parents, siblings, children, friends, roots. Not everybody wants to raise children far from grandparents. Not everybody wants to transplant an entire life.
And there is a practical advantage: if you have foreign income, formalized, declared, and taxed correctly, and you spend in reais, Brazil can be cheap.
Services can be cheaper. Rent can be cheaper. Food can be cheaper. House cleaners, plumbers, dentists, restaurants, good schools outside the most expensive areas: many things become accessible if your income comes from outside.
Electronics and hardware are expensive because of taxes and imports. You solve that by buying abroad when it makes sense, within quotas, declaring and paying what is due.
Quality of life in Brazil can be very good if you have means.
That is the point: do not depend on politics to have means.
Competent people are gold
During your career, do not be the nerd who only delivers tasks and leaves.
Medium and large companies have finance, accounting, legal, sales, operations, HR, directors. Make friends outside your bubble.
In Brazil, it is very useful to know at least one good accountant and one good lawyer. Not to ask for the wrong kind of favor. To learn how to do things right.
The environment is hostile. Here and outside here. Those who accumulate knowledge, tools, and reliable relationships survive better.
That is survival of the fittest. Not the physically strongest. The best adapted.
Conclusion
Election is not a life plan.
You can follow politics if you want. Follow it as environmental risk, not as religion. Rain, drought, earthquake, inflation, exchange rate, taxes, new rules. You do not control the sky. You control whether you build a roof.
Stop waiting for some brilliant change in the near future.
Plan as if nothing will change for a long time.
Learn English. Earn in dollars if you can. Understand taxes. Structure assets legally. Protect your family. Make competent friends. Use Brazil in your favor, without believing in Brazil as a promise.
When you do that, elections become background noise.
And background noise does not run your life.