Go global with your eyes wide open
Do you own a home or have other assets in a foreign country?
Was your spouse or civil partner or current lover or romantic partner born abroad - or they are English or Welsh and you were born abroad?
Do you spend a lot of time in another country, or have you done so in recent years?
The answers to such questions are important concerning the kind of will you make, the number of different wills you should make, and where you should make them.
The answers are also important for people who may have a claim on your estate, and on other legal and financial issues.
Spain, Portugal, France and Italy are still the most popular destinations for Brits buying second homes in Europe, but countries like Greece, Switzerland and Bulgaria are also getting a piece of the action. Above, the Greek island of Santorini.
Marbella. Melbourne. Tuscany. The Algarve. Dubai. Florida.
Britons in the many hundreds of thousands have assets abroad, usually a house or flat but also savings accounts or other property. Conversely, many foreigners have assets in the UK.
For all of them, a will in each country where they have assets is advisable - and, as with one's main will, it should aim for tax efficiency and may require advice from local experts versed in the foreign country's law, tax and financial systems, and language.
Crucially, any and all additional wills need to be drafted in conjunction with the wills in your other countries. It is normal practice, when drafting a new will, to revoke all other wills. But with foreign-country wills, more than one will at a time may have to be valid. If you want your Spanish will to cover your mansion in Marbella, and only your mansion in Marbella, make sure your Spanish will does not revoke your British will.
Plenty of tax versus no tax at all?
Wills are not the entire story, especially in an era in which many people live and work in a country other than the one in which they were born.
Residence, ordinary residence, domicile!? Welcome to one of the most complex areas of law and taxation.
Britain is where Anthony Shaffer (author of Sleuth and The Wicker Man, brother of Amadeus author Peter) was born and died, but Australia is where he lived during much of his adult life. Were his Australian roots deep and broad enough to constitute domicile in that country?
His wife, actress Diane Cilento, his brother Peter, and other family members wanted an affirmative answer: there is no inheritance tax in Queensland. However, others - namely, his paramour in England, Jo Capece Minutolo - wanted English domicile, despite IHT of 40 per cent.
Why did his girlfriend want his domicile to be in high-tax England?
She was not named in his will and wanted to make a claim through the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. To do so, he needed to be domiciled in England. If his domicile was Australia, she would not even be allowed to start a claim, let alone argue it. Full story.
More information on domicile is here.
Case Studies
Actor Richard Burton was born in Wales in 1925, lived most of his adult life in America, and died in Switzerland in 1984. A good deal of inheritance tax rode on his domicile - Wales versus America versus Switzerland. Full story.
Sir Charles Clore was born in England, has business links with Jersey, and died in Monaco. His tangled business affairs and questions of domicile required several court cases to resolve. Full story.
Andreas Nathanael left £50,000 to his Polish-born fiancee, Renata Cyganik. She thought she was entitled to more, but she would be allowed to argue her claim only if Andreas was domiciled in England or Wales. Andreas spent virtually his entire adult life in London, but he also had many ties to his native Cyprus. Agulian v Cyganik sorted it all out. Full story.
British billionaire Sir James Goldsmith had children with four different women - one Bolivian, two French, one English. Born in France to a British father and French mother, he lived mostly in England, returned to France in old age and died in Spain in 1997. Full story.
" . . . "
At the age of twenty-one he had inherited a considerable fortune, a hundred thousand pounds, and when he left Oxford he threw himself into the gay life, which in those days (now Mr. Warburton was a man of four and fifty) offered itself to the young man of good family.
...Mr. Warburton was a snob. ...He was touchy and quick-tempered, but he would much rather have been snubbed by a person of quality than flattered by a commoner. His name figured insignificantly in Burke's Peerage, and it was marvellous to watch the ingenuity he used to mention his distant relationship to the noble family he belonged to; but never a word did he say of the honest Liverpool manufacturer from whom, through his mother, a Miss Gubbins, he had come by his fortune. It was the terror of his fashionable life that at Cowes, maybe, or at Ascot, when he was with a duchess or even with a prince of the blood, one of these relatives would claim acquaintance with him.
He had stated in his will that wherever he died he wished his body to be brought back to Sembulu, and buried among the people he loved within the sound of the softly flowing river.
W Somerset Maugham, "The Outstation" (1924)
