Relocating to, or setting up in, the UAE
Moving countries changes the structure of a portfolio more than its contents. The questions that matter are which currency your liabilities are in, who inherits what under which law, whether assets should sit in your name at all, and how much cash a move genuinely requires.
Read these in this order
10 frameworks. Each one ends in a number rather than an opinion.
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01Currency risk and the dirham peg
The dirham has been pegged to the US dollar at 3.6725 for decades, which means a Gulf resident holding dirham property, dirham salary and dollar denominated funds is not diversified across three currencies but concentrated in one, and the exposure only becomes visible when the money is eventually spent somewhere else.
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02Tax on Dubai rental income
The UAE charges nothing on your rent, which is exactly why the double tax treaty cannot help a UK resident, and why a 4.33% net yield becomes 2.60%.
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03The Dubai golden visa against the Portugal D7
The asset test needs AED 2,000,000 that may not be sold for ten years, while the income test clears on AED 1,483,333 that stays sellable.
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04Wills and succession in the UAE
Assets held in the UAE by a non-Muslim expatriate do not automatically pass under their home country will, and without a will registered in a recognised UAE registry the default distribution rules apply to those assets regardless of the owner's nationality or intentions.
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05Corporate versus personal ownership
In the UAE, rental income earned by an individual from property held personally without a licence falls outside corporate tax entirely, while the same property held through a company is taxable at nine percent above the threshold, which makes the ownership structure a larger decision than most buyers realise.
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06Fund domicile, and the sixty thousand dollar trap
For an investor who is not a US person, holding US domiciled funds exposes everything above sixty thousand dollars to US estate tax at rates rising to forty percent, while the identical index held through an Irish domiciled UCITS fund generally carries no such exposure and half the dividend withholding.
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07Emergency liquidity
Emergency liquidity is cash held deliberately so that a job loss, a vacancy or a levy never forces the sale of an illiquid asset at the wrong moment, and for a property owner in an expatriate market it needs to be larger than the standard advice because the two risks arrive together.
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08Rent or buy in Dubai
On the illustrative Dubai apartment at flat prices, owning takes eleven years to have cost less than renting the same unit, and the three to five years every competing page asserts needs 2.24% a year of capital growth to be true.
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09The home you live in
A home you live in produces no income and cannot be sold without buying or renting somewhere else, which makes it a consumption asset with an investment attached rather than an investment, and treating it as the latter distorts every other decision in the portfolio.
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10Insurance and its gaps
Insurance transfers risks that would be financially catastrophic and is poor value for risks that would merely be inconvenient, which means the useful question is never what am I insured for but which single event would do the most damage and whether anything currently covers it.
Run your own numbers
Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser.
The unrecoverable cost of owning against the unrecoverable cost of renting.
The sixty thousand dollar threshold most non-US investors have never heard of.
What a landlord may lawfully raise the rent to on renewal, under Decree 43 of 2013.
Terms you will meet
Each is one sentence, then the trap it hides.
Not quite you?
Investments Playbook publishes educational research and general information. Nothing on this site is personal investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Property and securities can fall in value. Past performance does not predict future returns. Figures shown are indicative and may be delayed. Always take regulated professional advice before acting.