Building a status plan over ten years

Everything in this section assembles into an approach rather than a shopping list. The organising idea is that statuses do different jobs, and no single one does all of them.

The four jobs

• A tax base. Where you are resident and taxed. Decided by facts, evidenced continuously, and worth getting right before anything else.
• A place to live. Where the family actually is — schools, healthcare, work, community. Frequently the same as the tax base and not always.
• Mobility. The ability to travel without arranging permission. A function of passports rather than permits.
• A fallback. Somewhere you can always go, that nobody can withdraw. A citizenship, or at minimum a permanent residence.

Most people buy a product for one of these and expect it to serve all four. That is the error the whole industry is built on.

The sequence that works

1. Establish what you already have. Ancestry, marriage entitlements, employer routes. This is free and is skipped by almost everyone.
2. Settle the tax base first, with advice in the country you are leaving. The largest number in the plan is here.
3. Choose the place to live on the family's actual criteria, and obtain the status that fits it.
4. Start the slow accumulation. If the place you live does not accumulate into permanence, begin a parallel status somewhere that does — through descent, a European permit maintained honestly, or a child's education creating a route.
5. Add mobility last, and only where a specific problem needs solving.

The habits that make it hold

• A day log, kept continuously.
• Every renewal diarised two years ahead.
• A source of wealth pack, maintained rather than reconstructed.
• Wills in every country where assets sit.
• An annual review of thresholds and rules for every status held.
• Language study started on the first day of a permit, not in the year of the application.

The one-sentence version

Decide where you are tax resident, live somewhere deliberately, accumulate a permanent status somewhere that allows it, and buy mobility only if you need it. Everything else in this section is detail attached to those four sentences.