There is a question I ask clients, usually somewhere in the first or second conversation, and usually just when they have finished telling me how well they have done.
If you had to leave tomorrow morning with one suitcase, what would your wealth still be worth?
Not in some hypothetical apocalypse. Just this: tomorrow, 7 a.m., one suitcase, a flight you did not choose, and no certainty about when you come back. What travels with you? What can you reach from the other side? And what stays behind, suddenly worth whatever someone else decides it is worth?
The silence that follows is always instructive. I have asked this question of people with eight-figure net worths who realised, sitting in my office, that almost none of it would make the trip. And I have asked it of people with far less who realised, with some surprise, that most of what they have would travel just fine.
That gap, between wealth on paper and wealth that survives a suitcase, is what this essay is about.
The Century That Taught the Lesson
I did not invent this thought experiment. History did.
The twentieth century ran the experiment on millions of real people, in real time, with real suitcases. The German Jewish families who fled in the 1930s learned it in the harshest possible classroom. Many of them were prosperous: businesses, apartment buildings, factories, savings accounts. On paper they were wealthy. But the state stood between them and their assets, and by the time they got out, exit levies, blocked accounts, and forced sales had stripped away most of what the paper said they owned.
What crossed the border with them was something else entirely. Medical degrees. Engineering skills. Languages. Trades. Reputations that could be rebuilt because the knowledge behind them was intact. The doctor who arrived in London or New York with nothing still arrived as a doctor. The property portfolio stayed behind. The profession did not.
The same pattern repeats across the whole refugee century: the families expelled from Eastern Europe after the war, the East Germans who went west before the wall closed, the Vietnamese who left by boat, the countless others who walked away from farms, houses, and businesses their families had built over generations. The details differ. The lesson does not.
When people are forced to move, wealth divides cleanly into what travels and what does not. And the division almost never matches what the balance sheet said.
I am not predicting that you will become a refugee. The probability for most of my readers is low. But probability is not the point of the exercise. The point is that the suitcase question is the most honest audit of your wealth you will ever perform, because it strips out everything that depends on circumstances staying exactly as they are.
The Four Layers
Run the experiment properly and your wealth sorts itself into four layers. I use this framework constantly in my Plan B work, and I have yet to find an asset that does not fit into one of them.
Layer One: What Travels on Your Body
This is the wealth that cannot be confiscated, frozen, or left behind, because it is part of you.
Your knowledge and skills. Your professional qualifications, and more importantly the competence behind them. The languages you speak. Your health, which is an asset people ignore until it becomes a liability. Your relationships: the people on three continents who would take your call tomorrow. And your passports, the closest thing to a physical token of this layer. A second citizenship is Layer One wealth in its purest form: it weighs nothing, occupies a corner of the suitcase, and changes what is possible on the other side of every border.
Layer One is the wealth that rebuilt every refugee fortune of the twentieth century. It is also the layer that modern wealthy people invest in least, because it does not show up in a net worth statement.
Layer Two: What Travels Digitally
The second layer does not fit in the suitcase, but it follows you anyway, because it exists as entries in well-run systems that do not care where you are standing.
Bank accounts in stable jurisdictions outside your home country. Brokerage accounts that you can access from anywhere. Company shareholdings, provided, and this is the critical qualifier, that the structure is clean: proper registers, proper substance, proper documentation, no arrangement that collapses the moment a regulator or bank compliance officer looks at it closely. A shareholding you can prove from a laptop in a foreign city is Layer Two. A shareholding tangled in a structure only your home-country accountant understands is not.
Layer Two is where most of the practical Plan B work happens, and it is also where most of the mistakes happen. In an era of automatic information exchange and coming reporting regimes, the test of Layer Two is not secrecy. It is legitimacy plus accessibility: assets that are fully declared, fully legal, and fully reachable from wherever you happen to be. Hidden money is not Layer Two wealth. Hidden money is a liability with a delay on it.
Layer Three: What Can Stay Behind, Managed
The third layer cannot travel at all. Real estate, most obviously. Custody accounts tied to one institution in one country. Physical business operations. Machinery. Land.
Layer Three is not bad wealth. A rental property with competent management, a clear title, and a bank account that receives the income can serve you loyally from ten thousand kilometres away. I own Layer Three assets myself and advise clients on acquiring them constantly.
But Layer Three has two properties you must respect. First, it depends entirely on the quality of the jurisdiction it sits in: the rule of law, the sanctity of the land register, the enforceability of contracts. A property in a stable, boring country is an asset that can stay behind. The same property in a country sliding toward arbitrary rule is a hostage. Second, Layer Three is visible and immobile, which makes it the first target of every desperate government in fiscal trouble. Property taxes, forced levies, rent controls: the immovable asset cannot dodge.
The question for every Layer Three asset is simple: if I could not visit this for five years, would it still be working for me? If the honest answer is yes, it belongs in your structure. If the honest answer is that it would decay, be encroached upon, or be quietly absorbed by whoever is physically closest to it, then it is not really Layer Three. It is Layer Four wearing a disguise.
Layer Four: What Owns You
The fourth layer is the uncomfortable one, because it does not appear on any balance sheet as a liability, and yet it is the layer that keeps most people trapped.
The house with thirty years of accumulated possessions, where the thought of sorting the attic is itself a reason never to leave. The car that signals arrival to the neighbours. The furniture that was expensive once. The status: the position in the local hierarchy, the recognition at the golf club, the identity of being somebody in one particular town, which evaporates the moment you cross the city limits.
None of this travels. Almost none of it converts to anything on short notice. And unlike Layer Three, it does not even produce income while it sits there. It produces obligation. It has to be maintained, insured, cleaned, defended, and above all justified: every one of these possessions is an argument against ever changing anything.
The test for Layer Four is brutally simple. If losing it would cost you money, it was an asset. If losing it would cost you your identity, it owned you.
I have watched clients delay life-changing relocations for years, not because of tax complications or family logistics, but because of a wine cellar. I say that without mockery. The pull of accumulated things is one of the strongest forces in personal finance, precisely because nobody accounts for it.
The Point of the Exercise
Here is what the suitcase question is actually for.
A Plan B is not, at its core, a set of documents. It is a shape of wealth. And the art of it, the entire art, is this: keep Layers Three and Four small, deliberately, before anyone forces you to.
The refugee learns the four layers in one catastrophic night, when the ratio is fixed and cannot be changed. The planner learns them on a quiet Tuesday, years in advance, while every option is still open and every conversion can be done at full value and on his own terms. Selling a property in a calm market because you have decided to lighten Layer Three is a transaction. Abandoning it in a crisis is a loss. The asset is the same. The timing is everything.
This does not mean owning nothing. It means weighting. It means treating Layer One as a genuine investment category: the next language, the next qualification, the next passport, the health that keeps every other plan viable. It means building Layer Two with the same seriousness most people reserve for their stock portfolio: accounts opened, structures cleaned, access tested from abroad. It means holding Layer Three only in jurisdictions you would trust with a five-year absence. And it means auditing Layer Four honestly, once a year, and asking which of these possessions still serves you and which you now serve.
The Self-Test
Before you close this tab, run the audit. Ten minutes, six questions, honest answers.
- If you left tomorrow with one suitcase, what percentage of your net worth could you still reach one month later? Write the number down.
- Could you earn a living in another country within a year, with the skills and languages you have today?
- How many of your accounts have you actually accessed from abroad, on a foreign network, without anything failing?
- For each property you own: would it survive five years without your presence, under management you already trust?
- Which passports could you hold that you currently do not, and what has actually stopped you?
- Name the one possession that would keep you from leaving. Not the most valuable one. The one you would circle back for. That object deserves a very hard look.
Most people who run this test find that their wealth is far more geographically hostage than they assumed, and that the fixes are far less dramatic than they feared. Rebalancing the layers rarely requires selling everything and moving to the other side of the world. It requires a sequence of unspectacular decisions, made early, while they are still cheap.
The suitcase is a thought experiment. The layers are not.
Work with Sebastian
If the suitcase question left you uneasy, that unease is information. I help clients restructure the four layers while every option is still open: second residencies, clean international structures, and assets that survive distance. Book a consultation.
