Succession Planning for International Families

Succession planning for international families means reconciling multiple legal systems, forced heirship, and cross-border tax. Here is how to do it properly.

Succession is hard enough within a single country. For an international family, it is an exercise in reconciling legal systems that were never designed to speak to one another. A father in Dubai, a company in Singapore, property in London, a daughter studying in the United States, and a will drafted years ago in a country none of them now lives in: this is not an unusual picture. It is the norm among the families we advise.

The danger is not that such families lack a plan. It is that they have several, made in different places at different times, that quietly contradict each other. A perfectly valid will in one country can be partially or wholly overridden in another, and the people who discover this are usually the grieving, not the planner.

Good international succession planning is the discipline of making sure that what you intend to happen is what actually happens, in every jurisdiction that touches your family and your assets.

The core problem: multiple legal systems, one estate

The first thing to understand is that succession law is not universal. Two broad traditions dominate, and they treat your freedom to dispose of your wealth very differently.

Common law jurisdictions, such as England, the United States, and most former British territories, generally respect testamentary freedom. You can largely leave your assets to whomever you choose, subject to limited claims.

Civil law jurisdictions, including much of continental Europe, Latin America, and parts of the Middle East, often impose forced heirship. A fixed share of your estate is reserved by law for certain heirs, typically children and sometimes a spouse, regardless of what your will says. You cannot simply disinherit them, and attempts to route around the rules can be unwound.

An international family frequently straddles both worlds. The result is that a single estate may be governed by different rules for different assets depending on where each asset sits and where the deceased was domiciled or resident. Without coordination, the outcome is unpredictable and often unintended.

Forced heirship and how to plan around it

For families with assets or members connected to forced-heirship countries, this is usually the dominant issue. A common scenario: a parent wishes to leave a business to the child who runs it, but forced heirship reserves equal shares for siblings who have no interest in or aptitude for the company. The intended successor inherits a boardroom full of reluctant co-owners.

Planning around forced heirship is legitimate but must be done with care and in advance. Trusts and foundations can hold assets outside the deceased's personal estate, so that what passes is governed by the structure's terms rather than by the heirship rules applied to a personal estate. In Europe, succession-law choices under instruments such as the EU Succession Regulation can, in some cases, allow a person to elect the law of their nationality to govern their estate.

None of these is a universal solution, and aggressive attempts to defeat protected heirs can be challenged, sometimes successfully, especially where assets remain physically located in the forced-heirship country. The realistic goal is a structure that achieves the family's intentions while being robust to challenge, not one that pretends the heirship rules do not exist.

Cross-border tax on death

Layered on top of the legal question is the tax question, and they do not align neatly. Different countries tax estates and inheritances on different bases: some on the residence or domicile of the deceased, some on the residence of the heir, some on the location of the asset. The unwelcome result is that the same asset can be taxed in more than one country, and relief is not always available.

Inheritance and estate tax rules are among the least harmonised in international tax, and double-tax treaties covering death are far rarer than those covering income. A family with a UK-connected member, US-connected heirs, and assets across Asia and Europe can face overlapping charges that, uncoordinated, erode a substantial part of what passes to the next generation.

This is why succession and tax planning must be done together. A structure that solves the legal succession question can create or worsen a tax problem if designed in isolation, and vice versa.

The role of trusts, foundations, and holding structures

For substantial international families, personal wills alone are rarely enough. Holding structures do the heavy lifting.

A trust removes assets from the personal estate, provides for beneficiaries across generations under chosen terms, avoids probate in multiple jurisdictions, and can offer continuity and privacy. A foundation, common in civil law and in jurisdictions such as Liechtenstein, Panama, and several others, achieves similar continuity through a different legal form that civil-law families sometimes find more familiar than the trust.

Beneath these, holding companies consolidate operating businesses and investments, so that what passes down is a clean ownership interest rather than a tangle of individual assets in different countries. The combination, a trust or foundation owning a holding company that owns the underlying assets, is the backbone of much international succession planning.

Governance matters as much as structure

A structure is only as good as the governance around it. Letters of wishes, clear protector or council roles, family charters, and genuine communication with the next generation turn a legal arrangement into a workable plan. Many disputes after a death are not about law at all; they are about expectations that were never expressed. The families who transition wealth smoothly are usually those who talked about it while everyone was still in the room.

Keeping the plan alive

International succession planning is not a one-time event. Families move, marry, divorce, have children, acquire and sell assets, and change tax residence. Laws change too, sometimes sharply, as recent reforms to residence-based taxation show. A plan that is correct today can be quietly broken by next year's move or next year's budget. Periodic review is part of the discipline, not an optional extra.

How HPT helps

We coordinate succession planning across the jurisdictions your family actually touches, reconciling wills, forced-heirship exposure, cross-border tax, and holding structures into a single coherent plan. We work alongside your existing advisers, design and administer trusts, foundations, and holding vehicles where appropriate, and keep the plan under review as your family and the law evolve.

If your family and assets span more than one country, we would welcome the chance to help you plan for the long term.