A will written at home may not reach what you hold abroad

An uncomfortable subject with a practical core

Nobody moves abroad in order to think about this, and it is usually postponed indefinitely. The reason to spend an hour on it is not morbidity but the fact that a cross-border estate is substantially harder to deal with than a domestic one, and the people who have to deal with it will be grieving, distant, and possibly unable to read the relevant language.

The general problem is that assets sit in particular places under particular legal systems, and when somebody dies those systems each have views about what happens next. Those views do not automatically agree, and reconciling them is slow.

What follows is only a description of the shape. Succession law is national, it interacts across borders in complicated ways, and none of this is advice about any individual case. This is squarely a subject for a qualified professional in each country concerned.

Where an asset is matters more than where you are

A useful starting intuition is that immovable property tends to be governed by the law of the place it stands in, regardless of where the owner lived or what they wrote. Movable assets are treated differently in different systems, sometimes following the person and sometimes the location.

The consequence is that a single will drafted in one country may operate perfectly for part of an estate and be ineffective, or partly ineffective, for another part. People are frequently surprised that the document they regarded as settling everything settles only some of it.

Some systems also constrain who may inherit, reserving shares for particular relatives in a way that overrides an individual’s stated wishes. Whether that applies to you, and how it interacts with anything you have written elsewhere, is exactly the sort of question that needs local professional input.

Two wills, one will, and the risk of cancelling yourself

Where somebody holds assets in more than one country, professionals sometimes prepare separate documents for each, each dealing only with the assets in its own jurisdiction. That can work well and it carries a specific hazard: a later document containing a general clause revoking all previous wills can wipe out the earlier one by accident.

This is a well-known trap and it is the strongest argument against assembling such arrangements from templates. The drafting has to be coordinated, which means whoever writes the second document must know about the first.

The alternative of a single document covering everything is also used, and whether it is appropriate depends entirely on the countries involved. There is no general answer, which is the honest and unsatisfying summary of this whole area.

The parts a will does not control

Several substantial things commonly pass outside a will altogether: pensions with nominated beneficiaries, certain insurance policies, jointly held accounts and property held in particular forms of joint ownership. These are governed by their own documents and rules.

Those nominations are typically made once, often years earlier, and then forgotten through marriages, separations, children and moves. Reviewing them is quick, free and one of the highest-value administrative hours available to anybody with a life spread across two countries.

The other thing worth arranging is the ability to act during life rather than after it. Arrangements allowing somebody to manage your affairs if you cannot are recognised differently in different countries, and one made at home may not be effective where you live, which is a question to raise locally.

Make it findable, which is the part you can do today

Even a perfect set of documents is useless if nobody knows they exist. A very large share of the difficulty in cross-border estates is practical: accounts nobody knew about, a property nobody could locate the papers for, an insurer nobody thought to contact, a digital life behind passwords that died with its owner.

A single sheet listing what exists, where, and who to contact about it, kept with somebody trusted and updated occasionally, solves most of that. It does not need values on it and it does not need to be legally binding. It only needs to prevent a search.

Do the list this month and the professional advice when you can afford it. The list is free, it takes an afternoon, and it is what the people concerned will actually need first. Everything else in this subject is complicated and slow, which is a poor reason to do none of it and a very good reason to start with the part that is neither.