Off-Topic: Do Not Put Hope in Politics - How to Become Immune
Mandatory disclaimer: this is personal opinion. Read it with a bag of salt, not a pinch. The legal, tax, health care, education, and inheritance details here are Brazil-specific. This is not financial, legal, tax, electoral advice, or a life plan for you to follow blindly. If you are going to mess with companies, taxes, assets, marriage, inheritance, or tax residency, talk to an accountant and a lawyer who know your real situation.
Brazilian elections are coming again and the internet has already turned into a stadium. Organized fans on one side, organized fans on the other, everybody screaming, almost nobody thinking.
After 50 years watching this movie, my recommendation is simple:
get out of the political discussion.
Not because politics “doesn’t matter” in the abstract. It matters. Laws matter. Interest rates matter. Taxes matter. Legal certainty matters. The problem is thinking that your daily anxiety, your huge rant post, your fight in the family group chat, and your individual vote will transform the country’s structure in the next four years.
They won’t.
Brazil has problems too big, too old, and too expensive to fit inside an election meme. Whoever treats this like a championship final will end up like a soccer fan: happy for a week when they win, depressed for four years when they lose, and without having changed anything in their own life.
I prefer a different strategy: stop cheering and start preparing.
Politics became soccer
Brazilians have a strong culture of team loyalty. That’s beautiful in soccer. It’s ridiculous when it becomes politics.
In soccer, you choose Corinthians, Palmeiras, Flamengo, São Paulo, and that’s it. Your team can lose 7 to 1, hire a bad coach, sell a good player, go into debt, but you stay there. Because it’s identity. It’s the jersey. It’s tribe.
In politics the same thing happens. The person doesn’t defend a public policy. They defend a badge. They don’t change their mind when bad numbers show up. They double down. They don’t want to understand debt, inflation, exchange rates, taxes, productivity, education, pensions, the state machine. They want to know if “my side” won.
This is useless.
Worse: it makes you vulnerable. You start planning your life on top of hope. “Now it’ll happen.” “This time it changes.” “If this person wins, it gets better.” “If this person loses, it’s over.”
Don’t plan like that.
Plan as if nothing will improve in the short term. If it improves, great. If it doesn’t, you were already prepared.
The first problem: the math doesn’t add up
Brazil has high public debt by emerging-country standards. This is not a technical detail. It’s the base of reality.
According to the Central Bank Fiscal Statistics for January 2026, gross general government debt closed 2025 at 78.7% of GDP, around R$ 10 trillion, up 2.4 percentage points in the year. In international comparisons, the IMF criterion usually pushes that number higher because it includes Treasury bonds held by the Central Bank. So be careful with simplistic rankings. The point is not to argue methodology. The point is: the bill is big.
When the State spends more than it collects for too long, the bill shows up somewhere. It shows up in taxes. It shows up in interest rates. It shows up in inflation. It shows up in a weak currency. It shows up in bad service. It shows up in lack of predictability.
Populist politics is always seductive because it promises benefits now and sends the bill to later. Except “later” arrives. It arrives as IPCA. It arrives as a more expensive dollar. It arrives as high interest rates. It arrives as investment that never came. It arrives as a salary that doesn’t keep up with the cost of living.
Here is one of the biggest confusions in public debate: saying inflation is “caused by price increases”.
That reverses cause and consequence.
The Central Bank itself explains inflation as an increase in prices of goods and services and loss of the currency’s purchasing power. That’s how inflation appears and is measured. But in persistent inflation spread across the economy, monetary policy, credit, demand, expectations, and the fiscal situation matter a lot. When the quantity of money and credit grows faster than the quantity of goods and services, each unit of currency tends to buy less. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland summarizes this long-term relationship like this: when the money supply grows faster than the demand for money associated with real income and other factors, the price level needs to rise to balance supply and demand. The Fed also explains that monetary policy affects inflation by changing financial conditions, credit, and aggregate demand.
In other words: supermarket prices going up are a symptom. They are not the root.
Of course there are specific shocks: oil, bad harvests, exchange rates, war, logistics, new taxes, cartels, bad regulation. A product can go up for a thousand reasons. But persistent and generalized inflation usually involves monetary and fiscal accommodation. If the government spends too much, borrows too much, pressures interest rates, pressures exchange rates, worsens expectations, and pushes the monetary authority into firefighting mode, inflation becomes a consequence of bad public policy. The IMF calls this risk fiscal dominance: when deficits and debt pressure the Central Bank to subordinate price stability to the government’s financing needs, the historical result is usually higher inflation.
Political propaganda loves saying that “companies raise prices, therefore companies cause inflation, therefore the government must intervene”. This is convenient because it turns consequence into cause and a visible villain into a scapegoat. A company raises prices when its costs go up, when the currency loses value, when demand is strong, when the exchange rate changes, when taxes change, when risk changes. Can abuse exist? Of course. But localized abuse does not explain a generalized loss of purchasing power for decades.
In the last 20 years, this shows up in the numbers. According to the Central Bank’s SGS, the accumulated IPCA from July 2006 to May 2026 was around 197%. In plain English: prices almost tripled. In exchange rates, the PTAX sell rate went from around R$ 2.16 per dollar on 06/30/2006 to around R$ 5.18 on 06/30/2026. The dollar got about 139% more expensive; the Real started buying about 58% fewer dollars.
That’s why discussing elections as if they were a magic turnaround is childish. The next government inherits the same debt, the same tax system, the same pension system, the same Congress, the same public machine, the same interest groups, the same culture of pushing costs into the future.
It can change the speed. It can change the speech. It can change the package. But the structure doesn’t change fast.
The second problem: nobody understands the rules
Brazil has one of the most confusing legal and tax environments in the world. It’s not just “there are too many taxes”. It’s worse: too many rules, too many exceptions, too many interpretations, too many ancillary obligations, too many municipal, state, and federal norms.
The Federal Revenue Service estimated Brazil’s tax burden at 32.3% of GDP in 2023, the latest official study available. And the latest comparable World Bank metric, in Doing Business 2020, put a standard company in Brazil spending 1,501 hours per year just to comply with tax obligations. Doing Business was discontinued, so don’t use this as a current 2026 ranking. Use it as a snapshot of the size of the monster.
And most people don’t know how taxes work.
They don’t know the difference between income, assets, capital gains, profit distribution, pró-labore, dividends, declared offshore, tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax residency, holding company, probate, ITCMD, IRPF, IRPJ, ISS, ICMS, PIS, Cofins. They mix everything together.
A classic example: many people think having an offshore company automatically means “not paying taxes”. That is false.
An offshore can be illegal if it is used to hide assets, omit income, defraud creditors, launder money, or evade taxes. But a declared international structure, with the ultimate beneficial owner identified, correct accounting, and taxes paid according to the applicable law, is not automatically a crime. You may think it’s ugly. You may think it’s unfair. But don’t mix that up with tax evasion.
And here is the point: in practice, what matters is complying with the real law, not repeating internet memes.
The third problem: bad public service will not become Switzerland in four years
Even with high public spending, the perceived quality of Brazilian public services remains bad.
Public healthcare? If you depend on it, I hope you are well taken care of. But I would not plan my life counting on that. The 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. The math is simple: most people depend directly or indirectly on SUS and public infrastructure.
And when a line becomes an emergency, the conversation stops being abstract. In June 2026, G1 reported the case of Vilmar Pereira da Silva, 49, who died in the waiting area of a UPA in Recanto das Emas, in the Federal District. The report says he spent more than 12 hours there. The government said he did not have an open record and that the case would be investigated. Days later, in Sorocaba, the City Council demanded explanations after the death of a 14-year-old teenager who, according to the family and the report, went through multiple visits and waited 18 hours in a UPA. The city government and the institution said protocols were followed and opened an investigation.
I’m not using two news cases as national statistics. I’m saying something else: when the system fails, it fails real people, with names, families, and bodies. If you have an alternative, plan as if you might need it tomorrow.
Public education? If you have kids, be brutally honest: do you want to bet the next 15 years of their education waiting for an educational revolution that may never come?
In PISA 2022, Brazil scored 379 points in math, 410 in reading, and 403 in science, against OECD averages of 472, 476, and 485. This is not an ideological detail. It’s a weak foundation in math, reading, and science.
Of course most people can’t afford private health insurance and private school. I know. That’s exactly the problem. The country is expensive, public service is bad, and the private alternative is also expensive.
But denying reality does not improve reality.
Whoever has a chance to prepare needs to prepare. Whoever still doesn’t have it needs to start creating that chance now. Not four years from now. Now.
I learned this in the 80s
I grew up watching hyperinflation. Prices changed all the time. Money melted in your hand. Families had to do survival math. Then came the Collor government and the confiscation of savings accounts.
The Senate summarizes the Collor Plan: MP 168/1990 blocked amounts above NCz$ 50 thousand, converted into the new cruzeiro, for 18 months. Decades later, Collor returned to politics and was senator for Alagoas from 2007 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2023.
For young people, this sounds like ancient history. For me it is memory.
And the lesson is simple: don’t believe that “justice” always comes. Don’t believe that whoever broke lives will be punished proportionally. Don’t believe the system will recognize your effort and protect you.
The system protects the system.
You protect yourself.
So what to do?
The first thing is to stop spending energy on political cheering. You don’t need to become alienated. Read the news. Understand what is happening. Vote if you want to vote. But don’t hand your sanity over to it.
Your plan needs to work with any president.
And my plan, if I had to summarize it, would be this:
- learn real English;
- build a profession that can be sold outside Brazil;
- understand taxes and accounting;
- protect assets legally;
- raise children without depending on the State;
- build trusted relationships with competent people in areas you don’t master.
Let’s go piece by piece.
First: learn English
English is not a differentiator. It’s oxygen.
There is a reason this is one of the first videos on my channel: Akitando #32 - Como eu aprendi inglês e entendendo padrões.
Not every Brazilian profession is exportable. Unfortunately. But programming is one of the ones that are. Even today, with a harder remote market, layoffs, global competition, and AI messing everything up, it is still possible to work abroad. It is not easy. It never was. It only looked easy because of the bubble.
You start local. Gain experience. Study more than the others. Build a résumé. Learn to communicate. Improve English. Apply for a remote position. Get rejected. Apply again. Keep applying.
It’s not a six-month plan. It’s a 10, 20, 30-year plan.
Almost everything I explained on the channel was for this. Nothing there was optional. Fundamentals, networks, Linux, databases, architecture, security, English, communication, career, discipline. All of that is a survival tool.
The objective is simple: increase your chance of being paid in dollars.
Why dollars?
Because the dollar remains the most important currency in the world. This is not pro-USA opinion. It’s the mechanics of the international financial system.
After Bretton Woods, the dollar became the center of the global monetary arrangement. Even after the end of gold convertibility, it remained the main currency of reserves, trade, debt, and liquidity. Oil, sovereign debt, commodities, international reserves: too much revolves around the dollar.
At Bretton Woods, in 1944, 44 countries created a system where currencies were linked to the dollar, and the dollar was convertible into gold at US$ 35 per ounce. The Federal Reserve history summarizes this arrangement. Nixon ended gold convertibility in 1971, but the dollar did not lose its central role. The BIS shows that the dollar participates in almost 90% of global foreign exchange transactions and appears in about half of global trade invoiced in foreign currency. It fell as a share of official reserves, but it is still the main reserve currency.
In the 80s, the Plaza Accord showed how major economies coordinated a devaluation of the dollar against currencies like the yen and the Deutsche mark. It was not “devaluing the yen”; it was the opposite: the yen appreciated against the dollar. FOMC materials from 1985 already recorded the dollar about 14% lower against the yen weeks later. That adjustment was part of a context that, together with monetary policy, credit, and asset dynamics in Japan, preceded the bubble and the decades of stagnation. It’s not a simple little story of “US imperialism”. It’s a game of currency, interest rates, trade, geopolitics, and debt.
When a geopolitical crisis increases the price of oil, for example, importing countries need more dollars to buy energy. Reuters showed this during the US-Iran war: the dollar rose on safe-haven demand, higher oil, and Strait of Hormuz risk; Barclays estimated the greenback could strengthen 0.5% to 1% for every 10% increase in oil, precisely because an energy shock hurts Japan and Europe, which depend on imported crude, more than it hurts the US. If the local currency weakens, the central bank may raise interest rates, sell reserves, sell Treasuries, or intervene in other ways to defend its own currency. Sanctions against countries like Iran encourage alternative mechanisms in specific cases, but that does not prove the “end of the dollar”. On the contrary: it shows how the dollar is still the dominant network everyone needs to route around when they want to escape it.
You don’t need to like it. You need to understand it.
The Real is not a good long-term store of value. In 20 years, its purchasing power fell violently. Whoever kept wealth only in cash or in real-denominated investments that did not keep up with inflation and exchange rates became more vulnerable. Whoever managed to keep part of it in dollars, external assets, external business, or external income became less vulnerable.
A simple way to feel this: if a basket cost R$ 100 in mid-2006, by accumulated IPCA it would cost close to R$ 297 in 2026. And the dollar that cost R$ 2.16 went to R$ 5.18. No need for theory. Just look at your price memory.
Second: learn taxes and accounting
Brazilian salaried CLT workers usually think they understand taxes because they open the Federal Revenue program once a year and click “next”.
They don’t.
If you are CLT, the company gives you an income statement, the system pre-fills almost everything, you check half a dozen numbers and that’s it. It looks simple because the hard part was hidden.
But the real cost is much higher.
The company spends much more than the salary that lands in your account. Then you still pay income tax, contributions, tax embedded in products, tax embedded in services, consumption tax, property tax, fees, notary costs, capital gains, probate.
The exact number varies with salary, sector, benefits, FAP, RAT, collective agreement, regime, and a thousand details. But the intuition is correct: the total cost of an employee to the company is much higher than the net amount that lands in the account. Then, when you use that net amount, you still pay tax embedded in consumption. The tax burden of 32.3% of GDP does not appear to you on a single bill. It drips into everything.
You buy a property. Years later you sell it for more nominal reais. It looks like profit. Sometimes it isn’t. A big part may be just inflation. Even so, if there is taxable capital gain under the tax rule, the government charges tax on the nominal difference according to the applicable rules.
Simplified example, ignoring brokerage, renovations, notary costs, exemptions, and special rules for residential property: you bought a house for R$ 500 thousand in 2006. In 2026, you sold it for R$ 1.2 million. It looks like you made R$ 700 thousand. Except that, with accumulated IPCA near 197% in the period, that house would need to be worth something close to R$ 1.485 million just to preserve the same purchasing power. Before tax, you already lost around R$ 285 thousand in real terms.
Now comes the irritating part. If the Federal Revenue considers taxable capital gain on the nominal difference, the simplified calculation at a 15% rate over R$ 700 thousand gives R$ 105 thousand in tax. You keep R$ 1.095 million net. Compared to the R$ 1.485 million needed to break even with inflation, you lost around R$ 390 thousand in purchasing power. On paper, “profit”. In real life, loss.
You die. Your heirs discover probate, notary offices, lawyers, ITCMD, deadlines, family conflict, and cost.
Another example: you leave a R$ 1.2 million property to two children. The ITCMD rate varies by state; in São Paulo, for example, it is 4%. That alone would be R$ 48 thousand in tax. Add deed, notary, certificates, appraisal, lawyer, and probate expenses. If these extra costs end up at another 2% to 5% of the estate, that’s another R$ 24 thousand to R$ 60 thousand. Your children may need to pay something between R$ 72 thousand and R$ 108 thousand just to formally receive what you already bought with taxed money. And this is still the behaved scenario: no fight, no debt, no stuck property, and no dragged-out lawsuit.
I’m not saying every family needs a holding company. I’m saying you need to know how to do this math before, not after someone died.
You open a company. You discover opening is easy, maintaining it is expensive, and getting ancillary obligations wrong costs fines.
You need to know where you are losing money. In exact amounts. Not by feeling.
And that’s why taxes and accounting lead straight to the next point: assets without structure become an expensive mess.
Third: assets need structure, not improvisation
Here comes the part many people deliberately misunderstand.
I’m not telling you to hide assets. I’m not telling you to evade taxes. I’m not telling you to defraud creditors. I’m not telling you to transfer assets after being sued to try to escape enforcement. That can be illegal, voidable, and idiotic.
I’m saying you should study estate and asset planning before buying big things on impulse.
Instead of buying everything as an individual, it may make sense to use a holding company, an asset-management company, a corporate structure, a will, insurance, private pension, an international account, a declared offshore company, depending on the case.
“Depending on the case” is the most important phrase in the paragraph. Don’t copy an influencer’s structure. Don’t open a company in the Bahamas because you saw it in a post. Consult a professional.
Compare it with the same property inside a structure planned beforehand. Instead of being directly under your CPF, it can belong to an asset holding company. You own quotas of that company. Your children enter as partners or receive quotas through a planned donation, often with usufruct reservation, administration rules, and protection clauses in the articles of association. Again: everything declared, with accountant and lawyer. No hiding assets.
On the R$ 1.2 million property, ITCMD may still exist. If you donate quotas equivalent to that amount in a state with a 4% rate, the base bill may still be R$ 48 thousand. The difference is control. This can be planned during life, paid in installments if the law allows, done before a larger appreciation, and without turning the transfer of the entire property into a contested probate after your death. If the structure costs, say, R$ 15 thousand to R$ 30 thousand between lawyer, accountant, contractual changes, and registrations, you may be talking about something like R$ 63 thousand to R$ 78 thousand in planned cost, versus those R$ 72 thousand to R$ 108 thousand from direct probate. And the money may not even be the most important part. Your children don’t need to unlock a property in the middle of grief, with deadlines, notary offices, judge, family arguing, and the risk of selling badly just to pay costs.
A good holding company is not tax magic. It may have ITBI depending on how the property enters the company, it may have tax if there is capital gain, it may have annual cost, accounting, ancillary obligations, anti-abuse rules, and risk of piercing the corporate veil if you make a mess. It only replaces improvisation with governance. Instead of your heirs receiving a loose problem, they receive quotas of a structure that already exists.
But understand the principle: everything that is directly under your CPF is exposed to your CPF. Lawsuit, divorce, probate, family dispute, tax error, corporate confusion, debt, accident. The goal of a good structure is not to run from the law. It is to organize risk, succession, administration, and taxes within the law.
A legitimate structure can organize succession, administration, governance, and taxation, but it does not make assets immune to creditors, enforcement, division of marital property, fraud against creditors, or piercing of the corporate veil.
Jurisdictions used in international planning include places like the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, BVI, Panama, Delaware, Wyoming, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and others. Each one has rules, costs, reputation, reporting obligations, banks that accept or refuse, treaties, risks, and changes in legislation.
Some have territorial tax, some have state tax, some are good for holding, others for operations, others only look good on TikTok. And all of them can become a headache if you don’t declare, don’t have substance, mix personal money with company money, or try to use a structure to escape an already existing obligation.
The important thing is not to improvise assets when it’s already too late.
Fourth: marriage is also a contract
Marriage is love, of course. But before the State it is also a contract.
And a bad contract destroys assets, family, and peace.
In Brazil there are property regimes. Partial community property, universal community property, conventional separation of property, mandatory separation in some cases, final participation in aquestos. Many people marry without understanding any of this.
I consider total separation of property the most respectful way to marry.
Not because you love less. On the contrary: because you don’t need to financially trap the other person to prove love. Each one keeps clarity about what is theirs, what belongs to the other, what is built together by explicit decision, and how the family wants to organize itself.
This doesn’t prevent generosity. It doesn’t prevent buying things together. It doesn’t prevent building a life in common. It only avoids pretending that affection replaces accounting.
And, again, family assets can be organized more intelligently through holding companies, contracts, planned donations, insurance, wills, and clear agreements than by letting everything fall into the lap of probate fights and default rules.
And children?
If you can choose, have children when you can afford private healthcare and education.
I know this sentence irritates people. But it’s better to get irritated now than to discover too late that the State will not deliver what you imagined.
A child is the biggest patrimonial, emotional, and logistical responsibility of your life. It’s not an adult accessory. It’s not an Instagram project. It’s not “we’ll see later”.
If you want children, plan. Health insurance, school, housing, reserve, language, safety, time, family nearby. If you still can’t, work so you can.
Fifth: keep optionality
This may be the simplest rule of all: don’t leave your life hanging from a single point of failure.
One currency. One bank. One employer. One country. An expired document. One career plan. One platform that can ban you. One broker that can freeze. One account that can go under review. One income source that can disappear.
That’s fragility pretending to be simplicity.
Having a valid passport, a visa when it makes sense, a declared international account, reserves in hard currency, a résumé you can sell abroad, a network outside your bubble, and the ability to work remotely does not mean you are leaving tomorrow. It only means you can choose.
No government needs to persecute you to wreck your life. Sometimes changing one rule is enough. Freezing one account. Raising one tax. Closing one border. Creating one new obligation. Delaying one document. Slowly breaking the currency.
Whoever has only one option obeys.
Whoever has several options negotiates.
Don’t confuse this with paranoia. It’s just redundancy. Every programmer understands backups. Many people back up databases and never back up their own life.
“So why not leave?”
This question always appears.
My answer: go, if you want and can. There is nothing wrong with emigrating. If your life, your profession, your family, and your head point that way, go.
But don’t treat it as a moral obligation.
Many people have family here. Parents, siblings, cousins, friends, roots. Not everyone wants to raise children far from grandparents. Not everyone can or wants to transplant an entire life.
And there is a practical advantage: if you have formalized external income, declared and taxed correctly, and you spend in Real, Brazil can be very cheap.
Services are cheaper. Rent can be cheaper. Food can be cheaper. Furniture can be cheaper. Housekeeper, day cleaner, plumber, dentist, restaurant, good school outside the most expensive areas: many things become accessible if your income comes from abroad.
Electronics are expensive because of taxes and imports. Computer, camera, phone, hardware in general. You solve that by buying abroad when it makes sense, within allowances, declaring and paying due taxes when exceeding them.
Quality of life in Brazil can be very good if you have means.
That’s the point: don’t depend on politics to have means.
Build trusted relationships with competent people
During your career, don’t be the nerd who only delivers tasks and leaves.
Medium or large companies have finance, accounting, legal, sales, operations, HR, executives. 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 favor. To learn how to do it right.
The environment is hostile. Here and outside here. The ones who survive better are those who accumulate knowledge, tools, and trustworthy relationships.
This is “survival of the fittest”. Not the physically strongest. The most adapted.
Conclusion
Election is not a life plan.
Politician is not a father. Party is not family. The State is not a shield. Justice is not a guarantee. Local currency is not a safe reserve. Public service is not a contingency plan.
You can keep following politics if you want. But follow it as environmental risk, not as religion.
The weather can change. The rain can come. The drought can last. You don’t control the sky. You control whether you build a roof, store water, and learn to plant.
Stop waiting for some brilliant change in the near future.
Plan as if nothing will change for a long time.
Be practical. 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 this, elections become background noise.
And background noise does not run your life.