Twenty years ago, an Indian business family lived its financial life within the country's borders. Today, many do not. A daughter in London, a son who studied in Boston and stayed, an apartment in Dubai held jointly with a brother, an LLC in Singapore for the operating business's overseas arm — all of these are now ordinary features of an Indian promoter household. Each, individually, is a manageable item. Together, they create cross-border families: financial lives that span four passports, three tax codes, and at least one inheritance regime nobody has ever read.
Cross-border families generate three classes of issue. Most surface only when something — a transaction, a death, an audit — forces them to.
Tax residency, layered
The simplest cross-border issue, and the one most often misunderstood, is tax residency. A family member is not "Indian" or "non-resident" by intent or by passport — they are residents of one or more jurisdictions for tax purposes, based on day-counts, ties, and employment.
Common confusions:
- A son who has spent more than 180 days in the US, on a work visa, is a US tax resident — even if his Indian parents and his Indian assets are unchanged. He must file in the US on his worldwide income.
- A daughter who married into a Dubai family is a UAE resident, but her share of an Indian family business or her inherited Indian assets are still Indian-sourced. She has filings in India even if her income is largely outside.
- A founder who took up a Portuguese golden visa "for the option" may have triggered a filing obligation that their CA does not yet know about.
The mistake is to think of residency as a binary status. It is layered, ongoing, and constantly reviewable.
Inheritance regimes that disagree
The second class of issue arises at death. India has no estate duty; many of the jurisdictions Indian families now live in do. A family member who dies tax-resident in the UK or US may attract estate tax of up to 40% on their worldwide estate, including their share of the Indian family business — regardless of where the assets sit.
Indian families discover this typically in two ways:
- A scenario planning conversation with an advisor who asks the uncomfortable question.
- A filing requirement after a death.
The first is preferable. Preventive planning — through trust structures, residency adjustments, gifting programmes, and life-insurance design — can materially reduce the exposure. Most of the planning needs five-plus years of runway. None of it works once the person has died.
Asset structures that don't travel
The third class is structural. Indian asset structures — HUFs, family trusts written under Indian law, LLPs — often don't translate cleanly into other jurisdictions' regimes. A daughter who becomes a US resident may find that her interest in an Indian family trust is treated as a "foreign grantor trust" by US tax authorities, with annual reporting requirements that her Indian advisors do not know about. A Dubai-resident son holding an Indian rental property may face issues with the rental income's tax characterisation.
Cross-border families need an advisor — or a team of advisors — that can hold all of this in view at once. The single most expensive mistake we see is advice given by jurisdiction: an Indian advisor optimising the Indian side, a US tax preparer optimising the US side, and neither realising that the optimum on each side combines into a sub-optimum, or worse, an exposure.
A practical agenda for cross-border families
In our practice, we run a cross-border audit annually for any family with members in more than one jurisdiction. The audit covers:
- Each member's current residency and any pending changes.
- Each entity's tax classification in every relevant jurisdiction.
- The current estate-tax exposure across the family.
- Any reporting obligations being missed.
- Whether a private family trust, properly structured, would consolidate ownership.
The audit is not glamorous and rarely produces an immediate transaction. Done well, it produces something more valuable — a written, current picture of the family's cross-border architecture, and a quiet plan for the next five years.
The families that come through cross-border life with the fewest surprises are the ones that planned for it years before any single member moved. The families that come through with the most surprises are usually the ones whose first conversation about it happened in a hospital, or a courtroom.
We send only when there's something worth saying — typically once or twice a month.