Estate planning and trust formation are the same job approached from two ends. Estate planning decides what should happen to what you own. A trust is one of the instruments that makes it happen — particularly when the assets, the family and the tax authorities are not in the same country.
Estate planning
Estate planning is the work of deciding, while you are alive and able to, how your assets are managed if you become incapacitated and how they pass when you die. Done properly it covers considerably more than a will: who holds authority if you cannot act, which assets pass outside the estate, how liquidity is provided so that nothing has to be sold in a hurry, and what happens to beneficiaries who are minors or who should not receive capital outright.
Across borders it gets harder in a specific way. Assets held personally in four countries are settled under four sets of succession rules, and at least one of them may not follow your will — forced heirship applies across much of Europe, the Gulf and Latin America regardless of what a foreign will says. A plan that holds in one jurisdiction can be overridden in another.
Where a trust comes in
An offshore trust is a trust formed under the law of a jurisdiction other than the one you live in. It is less a tax instrument than an administrative one: a single place where ownership rests, governed by one law, so that what happens to an estate does not depend on which country moves first.
A properly constituted trust places legal ownership with the trustee and beneficial interest with the family, which is why, where the structures allow, an estate can be administered without opening probate in every jurisdiction the family touched. It also gives continuity — the structure does not pause when someone dies, and the trustee’s duties survive the settlor.
What it is not
It is not secrecy. Offshore trusts are reportable under the Common Reporting Standard, and under FATCA where a US person is involved; the structure and its assets are visible to the tax authority where you are resident. It is not a way to avoid tax that is owed. How a trust is treated for tax depends entirely on where the settlor and the beneficiaries are resident, which is a question for your own tax adviser and one we will tell you to ask.
It is also not always worth doing. A structure carries set-up costs, annual trustee fees and continuing reporting obligations, and below a certain size those exceed the benefit. We will say so rather than sell you one.
What we work with
- Discretionary trusts and private foundations
- Sub-trusts holding an individual investor’s portfolio
- Wills and powers of attorney, coordinated across jurisdictions so they do not contradict each other
- Pension consolidation, bringing frozen or scattered schemes into one reportable structure
- Life cover sized as liquidity, so an estate is not forced into a sale to settle a liability — subject to underwriting, premiums being maintained and a claim being admitted
- Succession mapping across the jurisdictions a family actually touches
How it works in practice
We are not a law firm. We design the structure, model how it behaves when someone dies or changes residence, and then bring in the trustees, lawyers and accountants in the relevant jurisdictions to constitute and draft it. We stay involved afterwards, because a structure nobody has reviewed in ten years has usually stopped fitting the family it was built for.
In our experience this is the part that gets skipped, because there is no product at the end of it. It is also the part that decides whether everything else holds.