Leaving Is The Easy Part
The Albanese Budget Hurt - now what?
Since the May budget, I have had a version of the same conversation more than once - we all have. Frustrated and asking whether it is finally time to move the business somewhere with a kinder tax regime.
It is a fair question. The capital gains changes and the new baseline tax on discretionary trusts landed hardest on us, the members of this incredible community. The people who carry the most personal risk. When the system feels like it is working against you, looking abroad is a rational response.
I have done it personally. Twice. Having left Scotland I spent years in Hong Kong and then in Saudi Arabia, where my daughter was born and where I built what was, at the time, the first international recruitment office in the city. I’ve placed Execs all around the world and seen many make a success of it and the same number make a failure of it.
I have also had a pregnant, crying wife in a bustling immigration hall, made several frantic border runs to activate visas (almost detained in Jordan during the Covid Outbreak), and been slapped across the face by a uniformed soldier in a fit of road rage (True Story!). None of that was in the plan I can assure you.
So treat this as a knowledge share rather than a warning. Moving country is one of the best decisions I have ever made. It is also far harder than the relocation brochures admit. If you are seriously weighing it up, here is what I wish someone had told me plainly.
The settling-in cost is real, and it is long. Longer than people think.
It takes six to twelve months before a new city stops feeling alien and you can really get under its skin. Before then, everything is friction. The bank, the phone contract, the school run, the simple act of buying groceries without translating a label in the aisle. My daughter almost ended up with my name whilst registering her birth!
You are not moving yourself. You are moving a family. The children have to be re-schooled, and they will grieve the friends they left behind. Your partner often gives up a career, a network, and an identity, and lands somewhere with none of it. That cost rarely shows up in the spreadsheet, but it shows up at the dinner table I can assure you. Your family can end up resenting you and I’ve seen the family fractures appear for many close friends.
Then there is the work itself. A new culture is not a holiday version of the one you know. Business gets done differently. Trust is built differently. The relationships that took you countless years to develop at home do not transfer in the luggage. Remember there’s people already there doing what you are doing successfully.
"Tax-free" usually means they collect elsewhere
This is the part founders most want to believe. Yes, there are places where your payslip is untouched and your capital gains are left alone. I have lived in them. But governments are rarely as generous as the headline suggests. They simply collect from a different pocket.
When I lived in Saudi Arabia, VAT went from five per cent to fifteen per cent in the space of a couple of years. The income tax you save can quietly reappear as a higher cost of living, school fees that would make your eyes water, rent that resets every year, and the flights home you will take far more often than you expect. Add it up honestly and the gap is often a lot smaller than the dream.
The piece almost everyone underestimates: you start again on trust
This is the cost that never appears in a spreadsheet, and the one I see new expats miss most often.
Your reputation does not travel with you. The referrals, the warm introductions, the "I have known him or her for years," the credibility that quietly opens doors before you have said a word. None of it crosses the border with you.
At home, your name often does work for you before you walk into the room. Somewhere new, you are an unknown. You earn trust from zero, in a market that does business on its own terms, often through networks that took locals decades to build.
For a founder or business owner, this matters more than for almost anyone, because so much of a private business runs on your reputation. Strip that away and even a strong operator can feel like they are in their first year all over again. Plan for eighteen months to two years before you are genuinely trusted, and build that runway in deliberately. Do not assume your track record speaks for itself. It does not, not yet.
If you are going to do it, do it well
I am not trying to talk anyone out of it. I am trying to help you do it with your eyes open. A few things that make the difference:
- Live there before you commit. Spend real time on the ground, not a holiday. Rent before you buy. Treat the first stint as a trial, not a verdict.
- Get the family decision right first. Your partner's career, the children's schooling, the support you are all leaving behind. If the family is not genuinely in, the business case will not save you.
- Build the local network before you need it. Start investing in relationships months before you arrive. Find one credible local who will vouch for you and open the first few doors, then keep earning it.
- Get country-specific advice early. Tax, structure, and legal arrangements rarely translate. What is efficient at home can be a trap abroad. Pay for proper local counsel before you move money or operations.
- Run the real numbers, not the headline. Total cost of living, schooling, healthcare, housing, and travel home. The honest figure is often far closer to where you started than the tax line suggests.
- Do not burn the bridge home. Keep relationships, structures, and optionality intact. The peole who move best are the ones who could come back, not the ones who had to.
- Be honest about what you are really deciding. A lifestyle move and a business move are not the same thing. Know which one you are actually making.
Do it for the right reasons
Living and working overseas was the making of me - without a shadow of doubt. It built resilience I could not have found any other way, and it shaped how I think about all aspects of life. If you have the chance, take it.
But take it for the right reasons. The urge to leave is sometimes a strategy. More often it is an escape. A reaction to a hard season or a difficult budget, and a feeling is a poor reason to uproot a family and a business.
If the numbers genuinely no longer work, go, and go properly, with a plan and your eyes open. But if what you are really running from is the weight of building something hard, a change of postcode will follow you onto the plane.
Most businesses worth having are not saved by leaving. They are saved by the decisions we make where we already stand.
