Residency and Mobility for the International Family
Residency planning is no longer a tax matter alone. We examine why mobility decisions for the modern international family must consider household, schooling, succession, and quiet continuity.
Twenty years ago, a residency decision for an international family was, in most cases, a matter for the tax counsel alone. Today it is considerably more complex. The questions a thoughtful family must address together extend well beyond the fiscal. They include where the children will be schooled, which residence will host the family at Christmas, where the senior staff will be based, and which jurisdiction will receive the family's estate when the time comes.
A Private Advisory Office is not a substitute for the family's lawyers, accountants or immigration counsel. It is, however, often the body best placed to coordinate the conversation between them and, more importantly, to ensure that the household decisions which follow from a residency change are properly thought through.
When a family adopts a new principal residence, the household consequences are substantial and often underestimated. Senior staff may need to move, or be replaced; their employment contracts must be reviewed against local law, which differs more than is generally appreciated. Domestic suppliers built up over many years, the trusted physician, the discreet vintner, the tailor who already knows the measurements, must be re-established. Alternatively, arrangements can be made for the family to keep access from a distance.
The children's education is a particular sensitivity. A move that looks, on paper, to offer a marginal fiscal advantage may carry educational disruption that no balance sheet captures. In several instances we have advised families to defer a residency change by two or three years so that a child could complete a critical phase of schooling. Without exception the advice has proved right.
Many of the families we serve maintain residences in three or more jurisdictions. The conventional approach of staffing each one independently is, in our view, a subtle inefficiency. Standards diverge. The supplier in one residence is unknown to the staff in another. The principal arrives in October to discover that arrangements made in May have been simply forgotten.
Far better, in our view, is a single household manager or Chief of Staff whose authority extends across all residences, supported by competent local staff who report to them. That person carries the family's standards regardless of geography, ensures that the principal's preferences travel with them, and preserves the institutional memory that would otherwise fragment across borders. The cost is meaningful; the saving in time, error and irritation is greater.
A family that lives across borders needs staff who think across them.
Residency decisions made in middle life carry consequences in later life that are seldom fully thought through at the time of the move. The jurisdiction that suits a principal in their fifties, for its tax regime, its connectivity, its medical infrastructure, may suit them less in their eighties. We encourage families, at the moment of any significant residency change, to think about where the principal would wish to spend their final years, and where the estate will ultimately be administered.
These are uncomfortable conversations. They are also, in our experience, conversations that families are quietly grateful to have had once the time arrives. A Private Advisory Office is not the right body to lead such discussions, but it is often the right body to ensure they are scheduled, and to provide the calm, neutral setting in which they can take place.
Finally, a word on discretion. The movements of a distinguished family attract attention from quarters that would prefer them not to. We strongly recommend that residency decisions, and the household changes that follow, be shared only with those who genuinely need the information in order to act on it. A move announced in confidence to one party has, in our experience, a habit of becoming known to many. The remedy is not secrecy for its own sake, but the simple discipline that information is shared on a strict need to know basis, and that the circle of need is far smaller than is generally assumed.
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