Your career crossed borders. Your financial life did not

Putting the pieces together gives the family a better chance of making the next decision. 

Hong Kong attracts people whose careers have already crossed several borders before they arrive. A technology executive may have worked in Israel, Singapore, and Hong Kong. A pension stayed behind in one country. Employer shares are held somewhere else. There may be an apartment back home and an investment account opened during an earlier posting.

Usually, none of this looks particularly worrying on its own. The pension has a provider. The portfolio has an investment manager. An accountant deals with tax. A lawyer may have dealt with the property.

It is easy to look at that list and conclude that the family's finances are well covered. The difficulty starts when a decision in one place changes the assumptions somewhere else.

Selling employer shares changes liquidity and perhaps currency exposure. Buying a home in Hong Kong can change how much cash needs to remain available. Leaving a company affects salary, unvested equity, and sometimes the country in which the family expects to live.

Someone looking only at the investment portfolio will see part of that decision. The tax adviser will see another part. Both can give perfectly sensible advice within their own area. The family receives all those answers and still must decide what works when they are put together.

This gets harder after several international moves. Financial arrangements tend to accumulate. People do not necessarily close a pension because they change country or sell a property because they take another job or consolidate every investment account each time their career moves.

After 10 or 15 years, a family can end up with a collection of perfectly reasonable decisions made at different stages of life. What is harder to see is whether they still make sense together. A balance sheet helps, but adding up the assets is not enough. I also want to know what the different pools of capital are for.

Money that may be needed to buy a home in two years has a different job from money intended for retirement. Employer shares must be viewed alongside the salary and career that produced them. An asset kept in a country the family may return to can have a purpose that is easy to miss if it is judged only as an investment.

The same problem appears with diversification. A senior technology executive can own a diversified securities portfolio whilst receiving salary, bonuses, and equity from the same company. A large part of future wealth may also depend on the same industry. Looking only at the brokerage account misses some of that exposure.

International careers make the picture less stable because geography can change faster than the financial arrangements. Currency adds another complication. A family may earn and spend in one currency whilst keeping investments, property, or future obligations in others. 

The issue is not simply whether one currency rises or falls. It is whether the currency of the assets fits what the family expects to use the money for. That can change after an international move, a property purchase or a decision about where the family eventually wants to live.

Hong Kong is a good example. Someone can arrive for a role expected to last five years and stay much longer or leave sooner than planned. Children, property, career opportunities, and ageing parents can all change the answer. A financial decision made today cannot always assume that today's country of residence will still be the centre of the family's life 10 years from now.

There is no reason all of this must sit with one institution. Tax, legal, pension, and investment questions require different expertise, particularly when several jurisdictions are involved. What matters is that somebody can see the connections between those decisions.

That becomes especially important around a large decision. A new job, a property purchase, the sale of a concentrated shareholding or another international move can affect several parts of the balance sheet at once. An answer that makes sense when one asset is viewed separately may look different when the rest of the family's finances are included.

The effect may also appear afterwards. For example, using liquidity for a property purchase today can reduce the flexibility available for a career change or another move a few years from now.

The objectives are usually much easier to describe. A family wants enough liquidity to change careers, help children, buy a home, or eventually retire somewhere else. Years of international mobility can leave a surprisingly complicated financial structure around those ordinary goals.

The purpose of putting the pieces together is practical. It gives the family a better chance of making the next decision with the whole picture in front of it.