When Clients Travel, Small Gaps Can Turn into Big Problems
Travel takes us out of our comfort zone, exposes us to new stimuli, and can rekindle a sense of awe as we leave the familiar behind and embrace the unknown.
It also challenges us to think and act differently.
But by stripping away our daily routines, travel can expose gaps in how prepared a person is to handle financial or personal emergencies far from home.
When a client shares their upcoming travel plans, our initial reaction may be to simply wish them well. However, advisors can play a more active role by helping clients prepare for unanticipated issues that may arise on the road.
Before they pack a bag, we can lead clients through a list of travel what-ifs and help them stress-test their preparedness for the off-script adventures—and misadventures—they could encounter.
An Advisor’s Pretravel Checklist (and Stress Test) for Clients
Whether it is for business or pleasure, travel often inspires a sense of what may go right—not wrong.
Clients may be prepared for the ordinary inconveniences of travel, such as a missed flight or a lost bag, but not a serious injury, financial scam, or emergency that leaves them unable to respond.
For clients who travel frequently or for extended periods, the following scenarios can reveal how prepared they—and the people expected to act for them—really are.
The Client Cannot Be Reached
A client may be traveling in a different time zone, vacationing in an area with spotty cellular coverage, or purposefully unplugging from digital distractions. But market movements, suspicious account activity, or sudden business deadlines do not take a vacation, even when a client does. Financial and estate plans that depend on instant communication become more vulnerable the moment they leave local cell service.
● Stress test: How quickly can you reach your client in a pinch? Do they have a fallback communication method while traveling? If a red flag pops up on an account, is there an authorized secondary contact you can alert, or does the matter sit in limbo until they find Wi-Fi?
The Client Cannot Act
Being difficult to reach is a logistical problem. Being unable to act because of an illness, injury, detention, or another emergency far from home can become a much larger crisis. When a client is sidelined, their plan may not hold up unless it can be deployed in real time—wherever they are—by somebody authorized to act for them.
● Stress test: If someone had to step in for the client tomorrow, how quickly could they establish their authority with financial institutions, healthcare providers, and other interested parties? Are the client’s financial and healthcare powers of attorney current and accessible, or are they stored somewhere nobody can reach? Could travel across state or national borders complicate the use or recognition of those documents?
The Decision-Maker Is Unprepared
Clients may have estate planning documents that name trusted individuals yet fail to fully brief those decision-makers on their roles or travel plans. A sibling, adult child, or trusted friend may be legally designated as a decision-maker, for example, but have little idea what is expected of them when they are called upon during a crisis.
● Stress test: Do the client’s decision-makers know they have been named, and are they still willing and able to serve? Do they understand the general scope of their responsibilities? Do they know where important information is located and which advisors, attorneys, or institutions they should contact first? Has the client alerted their decision-makers about an upcoming trip?
The trick with these conversations is not to catastrophize a client’s travel plans or come across as needlessly alarmist. At the same time, advisors can help clients understand what could go wrong so their plans can absorb some turbulence and remain aloft.
How to Prepare a Client to Hit the Road
TSA PreCheck is a screening process that lets travelers move through airport security faster and more easily.
Now that your advisory version of PreCheck has been completed, your clients are ready to move around the world. With the right preparation, their plans will be ready to move too.
To clear the runway for your clients, focus on these practical pretravel steps:
● Centralize information. Decision-makers who are stuck hunting for paperwork or guessing passwords in a travel emergency experience the planning equivalent of severe midair turbulence: It can throw the entire journey off course. Encourage clients to keep updated powers of attorney, healthcare directives, account contacts, and other important information in a secure, accessible, central location. Consider storing one copy digitally and another physically at an advisor’s office.
● Leverage timely check-ins. An annual review may not correspond with a client’s travel schedule or busy travel seasons. Use summer vacations, winter migrations, and major international trips as natural outreach opportunities. A quick check-in a few weeks before departure can make the review feel like a routine part of trip preparation, alongside immunizations, passports, visas, and other documentation.
● Coordinate the next steps. Letting clients know you can help could mean checking a custodian’s requirements for an existing power of attorney, confirming trusted contact information, or suggesting a call with named fiduciaries and, if added guidance is needed, an estate planning attorney.
Part of the joy of travel is encountering the unexpected. But when the surprise is unwelcome, the trip of a lifetime can stress a client’s planning past its breaking point.
We cannot stop a trip from going awry, but we can help clients plan for what can go wrong.
Cross-Border Clients, Cross-Border Risk
Clients who travel internationally or own foreign assets may move fluidly among languages, cultures, and customs. However, they may not realize that their estate plan will not automatically follow them across foreign borders.
Advisors and clients must be mindful of the limits of domestic planning and understand that plans written around US laws may not be recognized or function as intended in other countries.
Advisors do not need to answer every legal issue that an international lifestyle can surface. Spotting exposures early, flagging potential risks, and bringing in professionals qualified to address them may be enough to keep an expected border crossing from becoming an unexpected legal barrier.
Mapping the International Footprint
In the age of globalism, where people, goods, and ideas flow between countries, physical borders are not as distinct as they once were. Yet the invisible lines that legally separate nations represent different sets of rules that may not be compatible.
A client does not need to consider themselves to be a global citizen to have an international footprint and cross-border exposure.
These vulnerabilities may remain concealed behind what, on the surface, appears to be a completely domestic-looking book of business. Advisors can begin mapping a client’s international connections by watching for these common profiles:
● Foreign property owners. Clients who own a vacation condo, family villa, or inherited land abroad may discover that foreign real estate is governed by local laws and transfer procedures that do not neatly align with a US revocable trust or broader estate plan.
● Dual citizens or residents. Clients holding two passports or claiming legal residency in another country may actively utilize these benefits for global mobility without realizing that those benefits may expose them to conflicting legal jurisdictions and estate rules.
● Offshore account holders. Clients with bank accounts, investment portfolios, or business interests physically located outside US borders may find that these holdings trigger a distinct set of compliance obligations and transfer restrictions.
● “Slow-motion” expats. Clients who do not consider themselves expats but spend significant—and often loosely structured—parts of the year traveling internationally, such as retired snowbirds or digital nomads, may accidentally trip foreign tax or legal residency thresholds simply by remaining in another country a few days or weeks too long.
Any of these foreign connections introduces another legal or administrative layer into the planning equation. The earlier a client’s international footprint is identified, the more time the advisory team has to determine where domestic planning stops—and where additional global guidance must begin.
When Domestic Planning Stops at the Border
Clients may assume that a will, trust, power of attorney, or healthcare directive that works at home will work the same way wherever they travel or own assets. But that thinking can leave them exposed.
A document that is valid at home may be difficult to use or completely unusable abroad. It could be rejected by a foreign institution, treated differently under local law, or require lengthy legal procedures to be recognized.
Domestic planning limitations can be seen in the following common assumptions that clash with international reality:
● “My power of attorney is universally recognized.” A foreign bank, property registry, or local institution may refuse or delay acceptance of a US power of attorney. Recognizing an agent’s authority abroad may require formal translation, local notarization, or additional locally compliant documentation.
● “My US will controls all my property.” Real estate abroad may be subject to local succession and transfer rules that countermand the instructions in a US will. Some countries also have forced-heirship laws that reserve a portion of an estate for certain heirs and may limit how freely the property can pass.
● “My revocable trust avoids probate everywhere.” The concept of a trust is totally foreign to many civil law nations, and its legal treatment can differ significantly across jurisdictions. Foreign tax and legal authorities may characterize the trust’s income or beneficiaries differently—or decline to honor its intended tax, succession, or probate-avoidance effects.
● “My healthcare directive will speak for me.” A hospital abroad may not immediately recognize a US healthcare proxy, particularly if it is untranslated, unfamiliar, or inconsistent with local medical consent rules.
● “My beneficiary designation settles the matter.” Foreign retirement accounts, insurance policies, or investment products may follow localized transfer rules. A designation based on US assumptions may not produce the expected result.
● “My chosen fiduciary can step in.” A US-based executor or trustee trying to manage a foreign asset from afar may face institutional resistance, local residency rules, and logistical logjams.
These examples are by no means exhaustive and are not meant to suggest that every domestic document becomes useless once it crosses an international border.
The point is that validity, recognition, and usability can all create different risks and exposures. And even a plan that technically holds up under disparate legal standards can become harder, slower, and more expensive to administer.
Connecting Flights, Connecting Dots, and Connecting Professionals
A US passport provides access to much of the globe and the support of an extensive diplomatic network.
US embassies and consulates can assist Americans overseas with many emergencies and practical problems. But they cannot provide legal representation or resolve cross-border planning issues such as document incompatibility and conflicts between local and US law.
Being a US citizen and holding a US passport is not a golden ticket to a frictionless overseas experience. Local laws still apply and need to be part of travel plans—as well as financial and estate plans.
Clients may cross borders easily; their plans may not. The advisors who connect these international dots will not just retain cross-border clients—they will become indispensable to them.
The Access Problem: When Clients (or Their Families) Cannot Reach What Matters
A client departs New York for business on a morning flight and is in London by the evening of the same day.
Midair, they receive a potential fraud alert from their bank. Once back on the ground, they biometrically unlock their banking app on a train ride to the hotel and chat with a customer service rep in the States in real time. Later that evening, they meet colleagues for dinner and tap their smartwatch to pay the bill.
Back at the hotel, they try to access work documents on the cloud to prepare for the next day’s presentation, but something is wrong.
Unbeknownst to them, the same new-location logins that triggered their bank’s fraud alert have also tripped their company’s security system, which flags sign-ins from unfamiliar countries or devices as potential threats and locks the account until identity is reverified.
They are locked out of their account. Everything they need is stored digitally. They do not have physical copies of a single document. If they cannot log in, the entire trip could be for nothing.
Panic starts to set in. What now?
While a digital lockout could derail a business trip, an estate planning emergency could have even greater consequences.
The Estate Planning Digital Paradox
An irony of modern estate planning is that the more secure we make our digital lives, the more vulnerable we are to a total planning lockdown when a crisis hits.
Security features such as biometrics, multifactor authentication (MFA), and encryption do their jobs perfectly: They keep bad actors out. But in a medical or travel emergency, these same defenses can completely lock out fiduciaries and family members.
When a crisis strikes, legal authority alone is no longer enough. A power of attorney or trust agreement means nothing if the designated agent cannot bypass a text-message verification screen. A plan is not worth the paper it is written on if the right people cannot reach the right resources behind a digital lockscreen.
Tracking the Digital Access Chain
A client may know every one of their passwords, make this information available to their decision-makers, and still face a digital lockout. The real risk often lies in the hidden links of the verification chain:
● Single-device and identity dependence. Many accounts are strictly tied to a specific physical device, phone number, or biometric scan (e.g., Face ID). If that device is lost, damaged, or traveling with an incapacitated client, access stops instantly. Account recovery reliant on a single email address that is itself locked behind that unavailable device can trap the entire planning ecosystem in a loop.
● MFA lockout. Multifactor authentication adds valuable cybersecurity, but it creates a second locked door in a crisis. A successor trustee may hold the correct master password, but if their login attempt triggers a verification code sent via text to a smartphone that is locked away with the client’s belongings, out of battery, or simply out of signal range in a foreign country, the fiduciary is effectively locked out.
● Location-based restrictions. Financial fraud algorithms are designed to flag anomalous behavior. A login attempt from another country, an unfamiliar device, or an unexpected IP address can trigger automated fraud controls, demanding additional identity challenges or imposing a temporary account freeze.
● Institutional verification delays. Even when a decision-maker holds clear legal authority, the institution itself can become a barrier. Fiduciaries may face extensive delays while compliance departments require separate proof of identity, internal document reviews, or proprietary security questions before granting administrative access.
The key question is no longer “Who has authority?” but “What does that person need to locate, verify, unlock, or receive before that authority becomes usable?”
How Travel Can Test Financial and Estate Planning
Travel tests the operational mechanics of an estate plan like nothing else. What works from home may not work from somewhere else, so a plan should be stress-tested for accessibility—from both sides of the digital vault:
● The traveling client lockout. A client who normally logs in without issue from a familiar device and location may encounter added identity challenges, geographic fraud controls, or an automated freeze while traveling. A foreign IP address, disabled international service, or lost device can result in an account lockout that cuts off access to important financial information or emergency funds.
● The family or fiduciary lockout. If a travel emergency leaves the client incapacitated, family members or fiduciaries back home may have the legal authority to step in but encounter access issues. Automated fraud controls do not readily distinguish between an unauthorized user and a spouse, agent, or trustee responding to a crisis. The master password may be known, yet the required verification code gets sent to the client’s unreachable phone. Legal authority exists, but the institution continues treating the decision-maker like a stranger while it completes a review.
The accessibility stress test ultimately comes down to a pair of questions:
● Could the client continue to locate, verify, unlock, and use what matters while away?
● If the client could not act, could the right person at home do the same without relying on the client’s phone, email, device, or immediate cooperation?
Build an Access Plan, Not Just an Estate Plan
The solution to the digital paradox is not to weaken cybersecurity or spread passwords among family members. It is to build operational redundancy into a structured access system that identifies important accounts and documents, describes where they are stored, and explains how an authorized person can access them when needed.
That system may include secure digital storage, backup authentication methods, recovery instructions, current account and professional contacts, and guidance about who should receive access—and when.
By moving the planning conversation beyond asset allocation to real-world access, advisors can give mobile clients protection that moves with them.
Clients can then hit the road knowing that, whatever happens, their plan will not become the estate planning equivalent of lost luggage.