Let me describe a man I will call Thomas. He is a composite of several clients I have known over twenty years, so do not go looking for him, but every detail of his situation is one I have seen with my own eyes.
Thomas was German, in his sixties, and he had done everything right. A house in Spain, where he and his wife had lived for eleven years. A brokerage account in the United States, full of the American shares everyone tells you to buy. An old bank account and a small flat in Germany, kept from his working years. A will, even, drawn up by his hometown notary in 2004, long before he ever left.
Then Thomas died. And his widow discovered that nobody, anywhere, was in charge.
The Spanish bank froze the accounts the moment it learned of the death. The American broker wanted a document from the IRS she had never heard of. The German bank wanted an Erbschein, a German certificate of inheritance, before it would even talk to her. Three countries, three legal systems, three tax administrations, and a grieving woman in the middle holding a stack of folders and a phone that never produced a human being.
This is the quiet mess of cross-border inheritance. It is quiet because nobody talks about it at dinner parties, and a mess because it sits at the intersection of two systems that do not cooperate: the law that decides who inherits, and the taxes that decide what they keep. Most expats have thought about neither.
The rule most expats have never heard of
Inside the European Union there is, at least, a rule. The EU Succession Regulation 650/2012, in force for deaths since August 2015, answers the first question cleanly. Article 21 says the law applicable to your succession as a whole is the law of the state in which you had your habitual residence at the time of death.
Read that again if you are a German living in Valencia, or an Austrian in Lisbon. Your estate, all of it, worldwide, is by default governed by Spanish or Portuguese inheritance law. Not the law of your passport. The law of your sofa.
For Thomas, that meant Spanish succession law governed who inherited, including the house in Spain, the German flat, and in principle the American shares. His 2004 German will was not invalid, but it was written for a legal world he had left behind.
The regulation does contain the escape hatch, and it is the single most valuable sentence in this entire field. Article 22: a person may choose, as the law to govern his succession as a whole, the law of the state whose nationality he possesses. The choice must be made expressly, in a declaration taking the form of a disposition of property upon death. In plain language: you write it in your will. One paragraph. "I choose German law to govern my entire succession." That paragraph, which costs nothing, is the difference between your family dealing with a legal system they understand and one they do not.
Two caveats before you relax. First, the regulation binds most of the EU but not the United Kingdom, Ireland or Denmark. All three stayed out. The UK was never bound even before Brexit. So a Brit in Marbella or a German with a London flat is dealing with two systems that do not share a rulebook, and the interaction is genuinely unclear in places even to specialists. Second, and this is the part everyone misses, the regulation solves only half the problem.
The double problem: the law is not the tax
Article 1 of the regulation says it plainly: it does not apply to revenue matters. The EU harmonised whose law governs the inheritance. It did nothing whatsoever about who taxes it. Inheritance tax remains stubbornly national, and every country where you hold assets, or where you or your heirs are resident, gets to reach into the estate under its own rules, at the same time.
The United Kingdom rewrote its rules recently, and if you have any UK connection you need to know this. Since 6 April 2025, UK inheritance tax runs on residence, not domicile. If you have been UK tax resident in at least 10 of the previous 20 tax years, you are a long-term resident and your worldwide estate sits inside the UK net at 40 percent above the allowances. And here is the sting for people who leave: you stay inside that net for a tail of between three and ten years after departure, depending on how long you were resident. I have written before about what the end of the old non-dom world means. The IHT side of it is the part that ambushes emigrants, because a man who left London for Dubai four years ago can die a Dubai resident and still hand HMRC 40 percent of his worldwide estate.
The United States is more brutal and more obscure. If you are not American and not US-domiciled, your US-situs assets, which very much include shares in American companies wherever the broker sits, are taxed from a laughably small exemption of 60,000 dollars, at rates reaching 40 percent. The estate files Form 706-NA, and the broker will not release a cent until the IRS issues a transfer certificate, a process the IRS itself says generally takes 12 to 18 months once the paperwork is complete. I wrote a full piece on the 40 percent ghost in your portfolio; if you hold US shares directly and you are not covered by a good treaty, go and read it after this one.
So picture Thomas's estate again. Spanish law decides who inherits. Spain taxes the heirs as Spanish residents. Germany taxes the German assets and, depending on the family's circumstances, potentially more. The United States taxes the brokerage account off the top before anyone touches it. Three tax claims, partially overlapping, each with its own deadlines, and the double taxation relief between them patchy at best. The law question and the tax question are answered in different buildings, in different languages, on different clocks.
What the banks actually do
Now the practical layer, which no statute describes honestly.
The moment a bank learns of a death, the account freezes. This is not malice; it is self-protection. The bank does not know who the heirs are and will not guess. What unfreezes the account is proof of inheritance in a form that bank's legal department accepts, and here every country has its own sacred document. Germany wants the Erbschein. England wants a grant of probate. Spain wants the notarial acceptance of inheritance. The EU created a European Certificate of Succession to bridge exactly this gap, and it helps within the EU, but banks outside the system have never heard of it, and even inside the EU I have watched branch staff stare at one as if it were a menu in Klingon.
Every document from country A must be apostilled to be believed in country B, and usually translated by a sworn translator, and sometimes the translation itself needs certifying. Each step is two to six weeks if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Six to eighteen months of frozen accounts is not the horror story; it is the normal case for a three-country estate. The horror stories run longer. Meanwhile the widow still has a mortgage payment, and the money sits on a screen she can see and cannot touch. I made this point about joint ownership of physical gold, and it applies tenfold to bank accounts: access after death has to be engineered before death. Afterwards it is too late.
The forced heirship surprise
One more trap, and it mainly catches the British and Americans. Most of continental Europe, France, Spain, Italy and others, operates forced heirship: the law reserves a fixed share of your estate for your children, and no will can take it from them. In France, one child is entitled to half the estate; two children share two thirds; three or more share three quarters. A common-law testator, raised on the idea that you can leave your money to whomever you please, finds this out posthumously, through his lawyer, via his furious or delighted children.
The choice-of-law election helps here, but not perfectly. France amended its Civil Code in 2021 to give children a compensatory claim against French-situs assets even where the deceased validly chose a foreign law without forced heirship. If you live in a forced heirship country, or own property in one, and your estate plan quietly assumes English-style testamentary freedom, your plan and the law are not currently on speaking terms.
The checklist
Here is what I actually tell clients. None of it is exotic. All of it is tedious, which is precisely why it does not get done.
One: make the choice of law, or make one will per legal system, but decide deliberately. If you are an EU national living in the EU, a nationality election under Article 22 in a single well-drafted will is usually the cleanest path. If your assets straddle systems the regulation does not bind, the UK or the US for instance, separate wills per jurisdiction, drafted to not revoke each other, are often better. What kills families is the third option: the old will from 2004 that decided nothing.
Two: use beneficiary structures where the system offers them. US brokerage accounts can carry transfer-on-death designations. Life insurance pays to a named beneficiary outside the estate. Joint accounts with survivorship rights, where the local law honours them, keep the survivor liquid. Every asset that passes by designation is an asset that never sits in the frozen pile.
Three: powers of attorney that survive death, and liquidity outside the machine. In some legal systems a properly drafted power over an account can remain usable after death, in Germany the postmortale Vollmacht is standard practice, and it can bridge the gap before the Erbschein arrives. Whatever your jurisdictions allow, the design goal is the same: your spouse must be able to pay the bills in month two, not month fourteen.
Four: write the map. An asset inventory: every account, every property, every policy, every structure, where the documents are, who the contacts are. On paper, updated yearly, location known to the family. I have seen estates lose real money not to tax but to assets nobody knew existed. Structures help too; for families with serious cross-border wealth, holding assets through the right vehicle can turn three probates into one, which is the entire subject of our German-language site on Vermögensnachfolge and asset structuring.
And if you are thinking of solving all this by leaving your home country entirely, remember the taxman also charges an exit fee on the way out. Everything connects.
Thomas's widow got there in the end. Twenty-two months, five figures in professional fees, and a year of her life she will not get back, for an estate that was never in dispute for a single day. Every part of that was avoidable with a few afternoons of unglamorous work while Thomas was alive.
You have one estate. The mess is optional.
Work with Sebastian
If your assets sit in more than one country and your will was written for just one of them, that is exactly the kind of situation I work through with clients every week. Book a consultation.
