13/08/2026
Estate planning is the one area of financial planning that people delay the longest. Usually because it means thinking about your own death. Often because it feels like something for "later."
The most common reply I hear when I raise this is "I don't plan on going anywhere." Nobody does. That is not really the question. The question is what happens to the people you leave behind, and whether they are left with a clear plan or a mess to untangle while grieving.
For expats, that mess has a specific shape. Estate planning is not a single document you sign once and forget. It is an ongoing structure: wills in the right jurisdictions, clarity on which assets sit where, and a plan your family can actually follow without needing to become experts in two countries' probate systems overnight.
I have seen families spend a year, sometimes longer, untangling an estate that had no clear cross-border plan. Not because the estate was complicated. Because nobody had written down where anything was, which country's law applied to which asset, or who was supposed to do what.
None of this requires a large estate to matter. It requires assets in more than one country, which describes almost every expat reading this. A UK bank account and a Thai condo is enough to create the same problem a much larger estate would face.
The fix is not expensive and it is not complicated. It is simply doing it before you need it, rather than leaving your family to work it out from scratch at the worst possible time.
If you have not looked at this in a while, or ever, it is worth thirty minutes to find out where you actually stand. Tap the WhatsApp button below to start the conversation.
