You left. The paperwork did not. Most expats have 8 to 15 financial ties still generating exposure in a country they no longer live in - many of them dormant, half-remembered, or assumed to have been closed years ago.
Until everything is in one place, you do not actually know what your cross-border position is. You have a feeling. The feeling is usually optimistic. The map is rarely as clean as the feeling suggests.
This template was built by advisers running cross-border audits every week with British, Australian, American, South African and European expat families. It covers seven categories: accounts, property, pensions and retirement wrappers, insurance, debt, business structures, and family or estate ties. For each item that applies, you note which country it is in and tag it H/M/L priority. The result is a one-page map of what is still attached.
If your finished audit shows more ties than you expected, that is the most common outcome. The next step is usually a conversation about which ones to close, restructure, or simply leave - and in what order.
