If you die in a rented apartment in Lisbon, the first person to handle your body won't be your sister, your spouse, or the executor you carefully named. It will be a stranger, most likely a police officer or a paramedic, who speaks a language your family doesn't. They will pick up your locked phone and try to work out who you are. Everything you wrote down for the people you love is sitting in a folder in another time zone, and for those first hours none of it matters.

Most estate plans have a premise nobody states: that you'll die somewhere your family can drive to. The will, the binder and the password vault all picture a hospital in your home city, a phone call that comes the same day, and a sibling who can show up with ID. For a founder who works from Mexico City in the winter and Tbilisi in the summer, that picture is wrong. Being far away doesn't change what your plan needs to contain. It changes the order things happen in, and it puts the most important steps in the hands of people who have never heard of you.

Why your plan quietly assumes a geography

Psychologists have a useful name for why this gap is so easy to miss. Construal level theory, developed by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, describes how we picture events that feel far away, whether in time, in space, or in likelihood. The farther away something feels, the more abstractly we think about it. We keep the gist and drop the logistics.

Your own death already feels far off in time. Dying abroad adds distance in space and in probability. So the thinking goes abstract three times over, and the plan ends up as a single comforting sentence: my brother will handle it. That sentence answers who. It says nothing about how. How does your brother find out? Which country's paperwork does he file? Who pays to fly your body home, and how does he prove he has the right to ask?

When you think concretely, things you never noticed become obvious. When you think abstractly, they disappear. A good plan for working abroad is mostly the job of dragging that abstract sentence back down into specifics.

The first 72 hours happen in someone else's system

When someone dies abroad, a few things tend to happen early, and in roughly this order.

Identification and notification. Local authorities need to know who you are and who to call. If you live alone, keep your passport in a drawer and use a phone with a passcode, that can take a long time. Many people don't know that iPhones and Android phones both let you set emergency contacts and medical details that a first responder can see from the lock screen. It's one of the few parts of this whole process that you can fully set up in five minutes.

Consular involvement. Your home country's embassy or consulate usually has a role. For U.S. citizens, the State Department's consular officers can help find and notify next of kin, explain local options, and issue a Consular Report of Death of a U.S. Citizen Abroad. That document is often what your family needs to settle affairs back home. What the embassy generally won't do is pay. Government guidance makes clear that the costs of repatriation or local burial fall on the family or the estate.

Decisions about remains. Local law sets the deadlines, and in some places they're short. Your family may be asked to choose between repatriation, local burial and cremation within days. They'll be choosing from overseas, possibly in the middle of the night, possibly in a language they're working through with a translation app. If you have any feelings about this at all, they need to be written down somewhere your family can find on the first day. Leaving it to day ten is too late.

The point of walking through this sequence isn't to scare you. It's to show where your plan actually begins. The account logins, the Stripe balance and the domain renewals all matter, but they come later. The first part of a nomad's plan is a handoff to a stranger, and the most useful thing you can do is make that stranger's job easy.

Your assets don't all live where you do

Once the immediate crisis is over, a slower complication shows up: the law governing your estate may not be the law you assumed.

A will written in your home country may be perfectly valid there, and still not be a simple tool for dealing with an apartment you bought in Spain or a bank account you opened in Portugal. Property and accounts held in another country often have to go through that country's own process. In the U.S. this is sometimes called ancillary probate, and other countries have their own versions. Each one can mean another set of forms, another lawyer, translated and certified documents, and another wait.

In the European Union, the Succession Regulation, which has applied since 2015, generally makes the law of your habitual residence the default for your whole estate. It also lets you choose the law of your nationality instead, but only if you make that choice explicitly in your will. Many civil-law countries also have forced heirship rules, which reserve a share of the estate for children or other relatives no matter what your will says. A nomad who has spent long enough in one place can find that the country they'd call "just where I'm living for now" has a say in who inherits.

None of this means you need a lawyer in every country you've worked from. It means you should know which countries hold something of yours, whether that's real estate, a bank account, a registered company, or a lease with a deposit, and ask a professional where those things will be dealt with. Not knowing is the expensive part. Your family will be the ones paying to find out.

The people who would know first

There's a quieter part of this that has nothing to do with law.

When you live at home, people notice when you go missing. A neighbor sees the mail piling up. A friend texts and gets no answer and drives over. Abroad, that informal web is thin or doesn't exist. You may be the person nobody would think to check on, and your family may assume you're just busy, in another time zone, between flights. The silence can go on for a long time before anyone treats it as a problem.

That's why every nomad's plan needs at least one local person: a landlord, a coworking friend, a neighbor. Someone who would notice you'd gone quiet and knows who to call. It can feel like a strange favor to ask someone you met six weeks ago. Most people would rather be asked than find out later that they could have helped.

Your next moves

  • Set up your phone's lock-screen emergency info today. On iPhone, open Health → Medical ID, add emergency contacts with full international dialing codes, and turn on "Show When Locked." On Android, find Emergency information under Settings → Safety & emergency (the menu name varies by manufacturer). Write any notes in English, plus the local language if you can.
  • Write a one-page "If something happens to me here" sheet and update it each time you move. It should list your current address, your nearest embassy or consulate, your passport number, your insurer's name and policy number, the local person who knows you, and the one person back home who should be called first. Leave a printed copy somewhere obvious in your apartment and keep a copy in your digital vault.
  • Read your insurance policy for the words "repatriation of mortal remains." Plenty of travel and expat health plans cover medical evacuation but handle repatriation of remains differently, or not at all. Find out which you have before you have to rely on it.
  • Register your trips with your government. U.S. citizens can use the State Department's Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), and other countries have similar services. It helps the embassy reach you, and reach your family, in an emergency.
  • List every country that holds something of yours (property, bank accounts, companies, deposits) and book one call with an estate lawyer to ask whether your will actually covers each one, and whether you should formally state which country's law you want to apply.

Where Heirloom fits

The hardest part of planning for a death abroad is getting the right information to the right person in the right order: the stranger first, then your family, then your executor. Heirloom was built as a death binder for solo founders, and that sequencing is what it's for. Your vault holds the business details. The handoff decides who gets access and when. Your beneficiaries know where to look before they need to. If you work from wherever your laptop happens to be, it's worth making sure your plan can reach you there. You can start building it at heirloom.lumenlabs.works.