The average expat we review is losing £8,000 to £40,000 a year (or A$15,000 to A$75,000 equivalent) to preventable drag. Most do not know it is happening, because none of it shows up as a line item on a statement.
It is never one big leak. It is five small ones, compounding quietly across a decade. The wrong pension wrapper. An ISA that lost its tax-free status when you moved. A treaty article you never claimed. A 2% FX spread on every pension payment. A special regime that closed its window two years ago.
This estimator was built by advisers running cross-border financial reviews every week. It names the five most common drag categories, gives a percentage range for each, and walks through three worked examples (a UK expat in Spain, an Australian in the UK, and a US expat in Portugal) so you can see roughly where your own number lands.
If your estimated drag is well into five figures, the first job is not to fix everything at once. It is to fix the one that is losing you the most. A short conversation with one of our advisers can tell you which one that is.
