Written exclusively for Expat Network by DGLegacy

Many expats have hard-earned assets such as savings accounts in banks, insurance policies, pension funds, stock options, company stocks, real estate, cryptocurrencies, and RSUs.

We all believe that if anything happened to us, these assets would go to our families. Unfortunately, that might not be the case. It is quite possible that your hard-earned money and assets would be legally “stolen” after you’re gone, instead of reaching your family.

How can that happen? There are a few reasons.

Reason 1: Complex assets

Even if most of us are not as rich as Jeff Bezos, many of us still have multiple types of assets, such as bank accounts, insurance policies, pension funds, and real estate.

In addition to being complex, these assets are usually stored in different places – various asset management systems, funds, banks, insurance companies, etc. This makes it particularly difficult to track them, even for the owners, let alone their families.

Reason 2: Cross-country assets

Most expats have assets residing in different countries. When we move to a new country, we usually open local bank accounts, have local insurance, might buy some real estate, etc.

Having diverse and complex assets makes it very difficult for our family even to identify them. But when you add the fact that some of these assets are in countries other than that in which the family members reside, the estate seems like a chimera.

Reason 3: Most asset management companies and funds globally don’t have a legal obligation to trace heirs

Often companies which hold your assets don’t have a legal obligation to look for your family members if anything happens to you.

So wait! If the companies storing your assets don’t look for your family members, and your heirs don’t know about these assets or where they are, how can they inherit them?

Exactly. Your family probably won’t inherit your money at all.

How big is the problem, actually?

Very big indeed. Unclaimed assets are reaching unprecedented levels, with estimates that “run as high as $80 billion” in the USA according to the New York Times and £77B in the UK, according to moneyfacts.co.uk.

And this amount is growing at an alarming and accelerating rate – approximately $5 billion per year in the US alone, currently!

This is the situation just in the US and UK. There are no reliable statistics for the total value of unclaimed assets in the rest of the world, but if they are approaching $200 billion in the US and UK, we might be talking about a trillion-dollar unclaimed asset problem globally.

So what will happen with our assets?

In many cases, family members do not know where to search for the assets or how to claim ownership, primarily due to the reasons discussed above:

• the family doesn’t know in which asset management system or bank the assets are stored;
• the assets reside in different countries;
• the assets are complex, and the family doesn’t know how to claim them.

As a result, your money remains in the companies which store it, instead of being inherited by your family.

How can you ensure your assets will be inherited by your family if anything happens to you?

The good news is that we can easily and cheaply protect our families and secure our assets.

DGLegacy is a digital inheritance and asset protection service through which, in the case of an unforeseen event happening to you, people whom you designate as beneficiaries will be informed about your assets and will be able to identify and locate them, thus minimizing the chance of an unclaimed asset.

The service allows you to easily catalogue your assets, such as bank accounts, insurances, company stock, stock options, and RSUs, and to designate beneficiaries for them. You don’t enter any confidential information such as the amount of your money, the value of your stocks, keys or passwords – only general information about the assets which will allow your beneficiaries to find them. All your data is fully encrypted, stored only in private data centres in the EU, used only to operate the service, and never shared with any third parties!

The DGLegacy service has a custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol which verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

The service provides many additional features that can help you ensure that your family will inherit your assets.

With the DGLegacy digital inheritance and asset protection service, you can find peace of mind. It ensures that your family will be informed about the assets if anything happens to you, so they are aware of your assets and can easily identify and locate them.