Your US will doesn’t count for much once you own property abroad — 3 mistakes that make it worse
Here’s something most people don’t find out until it’s too late: writing a US will and calling your estate plan “done” does not automatically cover a house, apartment, or land you buy abroad. In a long list of countries, local law decides who inherits real estate sitting on their soil, not the document you signed at a lawyer’s office back home.
Get this wrong and the people you meant to leave everything to can end up splitting your property with relatives you never even listed. Here are three estate-planning mistakes that trip up Americans the moment they buy property outside the US.
1. Assuming your US will controls property you buy abroad
This is the one that catches people off guard the most, so it’s worth getting out of the way first. Real estate is governed by the law of wherever it physically sits, not by your home state’s law, and definitely not by whatever your US will requests.
Popular expat property markets like France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Panama, and Switzerland all default to something called forced heirship, which reserves a fixed share of an estate for children and spouses no matter what a will says. In France, for instance, two children are automatically entitled to two-thirds of an estate, full stop. Buy a place planning to leave it entirely to a partner, and local law can hand a chunk of it to kids from a previous marriage instead, whether that was the plan or not.
Nobody sits down at closing thinking about their eventual heirs. But that’s exactly the moment this needs sorting out, not the moment right after.
2. Not making a legal “choice of law” election in the EU
Here’s the part that actually has a fix, if you know to use it. The EU Succession Regulation, known as Brussels IV, lets a US citizen with property in a participating EU country elect for US law to govern that property’s inheritance instead of the local default.
The catch is that nothing happens automatically. The election has to be written explicitly into a valid will, and skipping that step means the law of wherever you were living when you died takes over by default, forced heirship included. France has also complicated its own workaround: since a 2021 amendment, it can still apply forced heirship to a resident’s estate even after a US law election, if French children would otherwise end up with less than their reserved share.
So yes, this is one of those rare cases where the fine print of an EU regulation is genuinely worth reading, not just skimming.
Psst — thinking about actually doing this? I put everything I know about leaving the U.S. for good into one no-fluff guide: visas, jobs, country picks, the works — grab it here.
3. Assuming an estate tax treaty has your back
The US only has estate tax treaties with sixteen countries: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. Those treaties exist specifically to stop the same assets from getting taxed twice.
Own property in a country that isn’t on that list, and there’s no treaty backstop if both countries decide they each have a claim on the estate. Even inside a treaty country, state-level estate tax doesn’t disappear either. A federal treaty does nothing for New York’s state estate tax, for example, which is a detail that catches people off guard constantly.
If there’s one line item worth paying an actual estate attorney for instead of Googling at midnight, it’s this one.
None of this means skip the property purchase or cancel the move abroad. Plenty of people navigate all three of these just fine. It just means the will you already have probably isn’t doing what you assume it’s doing the second real estate outside the US enters the picture. Worth a phone call to someone who actually knows the local law before signing anything, right?
