Wealth structured properly,
wherever you choose to live.

His pension sat in Sweden, where the rules decided when he could draw, how much, and how it would be taxed. Every option he was interested in — retiring somewhere warmer, drawing earlier, leaving something behind — ran into a rule written for someone else’s life.

We transferred the pension out of Sweden into an offshore structure, having first established what would be given up as well as gained. The transfer was never the point. What it made possible afterwards was.

• Real investment control, rather than a provider’s menu
• Drawdown on his timetable, not a scheme’s
• A simpler tax position he can explain in a sentence
• Free to retire almost anywhere in Europe without unpicking it again

Like most people, they had written Spain off as a high-tax country and assumed retiring there would simply cost them. Nobody had told them that Spain writes real advantages into law for arriving residents, or that almost all of them depend on decisions taken before residency begins.

We structured a compliant foreign pension arrangement recognised under Spanish rules, put in place ahead of the move, and aligned the wider portfolio with the regime they were about to enter rather than the one they were leaving.

• Meaningful relief from Spanish wealth tax on the structured assets
• Estate planning settled in advance, in a form their children understand
• Income drawn against future capital growth at an effective rate under 3%
• No annual scramble over what is reportable, and where

It was the best question I was asked that year. Norway taxes unrealised gains on departure and applies a wealth tax for as long as you remain. Three years is not early. Three years is the entire opportunity, because almost everything worth doing has to be done while you are still resident.

A restructuring exercise rather than a transfer. We mapped which holdings fell inside the exit tax net and which sat outside it, reviewed where a disposal and reacquisition would reset the cost base to his advantage while still Norwegian resident, and moved future growth into an assurance wrapper so it accrued inside a structure rather than on a personal balance sheet exposed to wealth tax.

• Exit tax exposure reduced to the holdings that genuinely fall within it
• Cost base rebased where doing so improved the position, before departure
• Future growth sheltered from ongoing Norwegian wealth tax
• Positioned for Italy’s 7% flat rate regime for foreign pensioners in the south
• Flexibility retained throughout, in case the plan changed