Question

My wife and I are 55 and in good health. We have two adult children, one of whom lives overseas and is unlikely to return.

We own a family holiday home worth about R20 million. It has been passed down through the family for generations and is very special to us. We would really like to see it remain in the family, but realistically our child living overseas will not get much benefit from owning a share in a South African holiday home.

We would like the house ultimately to go to our child who remains in South Africa, but we also want to make sure that our overseas child is treated fairly. What can we do?

Answer

If you leave the holiday home equally to both children, it may look fair but the reality will be different.

Your South African child may use the property regularly and feel strongly about keeping it in the family, while the child who has settled overseas may have very little practical use for a half-share in a South African holiday home.

At some point, the overseas child may quite reasonably want to realise the value of that share. The South African child would then need to find perhaps R10 million to buy out the sibling. If that money is not available, the family could ultimately be forced to sell the property. The holiday home that has survived for generations could therefore be lost, not because anybody wanted to sell it, but because the estate plan confused equal ownership with fair treatment.

A better approach may be to leave the holiday home to the child who is likely to use it while deliberately creating equivalent value for the child living overseas.

The arithmetic is quite straightforward. If the holiday home is worth R20 million and one child inherits the entire property, that child receives R20 million of value. To treat the other child equally, you would ideally want to create approximately R20 million of value for the overseas child from other assets.

That does not necessarily mean you need to buy R20 million of life insurance tomorrow. You first need to look at the rest of your estate. If, for example, the overseas child is already likely to receive R6 million from investments, cash or other assets, the remaining equalisation shortfall would be around R14 million.

The principle is therefore to calculate the gap first and then decide how best to fill it.  This is where life insurance can become a very useful estate-planning tool.

Most people think about life insurance as something used to settle a bond, replace income or provide for a surviving spouse. But life cover can also be used to equalise an estate that contains a large indivisible asset. It effectively creates liquidity at the precise time that the estate needs it.

Because your child living overseas is unlikely to return to South Africa, I would consider using an appropriately structured offshore, dollar-denominated life policy to fund the equalisation amount. This can provide the child with liquid funds offshore and may also have estate-duty advantages in South Africa.

An advantage of offshore life cover is the potential estate-duty benefit. A properly structured non-domestic offshore policy may not trigger estate duty. For example, if R14 million of cover would otherwise be subject to estate duty at 20%, the potential difference could be as much as R2.8 million.

There is also a practical benefit for the overseas child. Instead of inheriting a share in a South African property, they can receive a liquid foreign-currency amount offshore. This can make the inheritance easier to access, reduce administration and better match where they now live.

In this example, R6 million of existing assets plus R14 million of offshore cover could give the overseas child roughly the same R20 million value as the holiday home passing to the South African child

There is also an important family benefit to this structure. By leaving the house jointly to both children, you create an ongoing financial relationship between them. They will need to agree on rates, maintenance, insurance, renovations, who uses the house over the holidays, whether it can be rented out and eventually whether it should be sold.  These may appear to be small practical issues, but they are often where family conflict starts.   This solution removes this potential source of conflict.

Estate planning should therefore not only be about tax efficiency. It should also reduce the number of difficult financial decisions your children will be forced to make together after you are gone.

 As you are in good health, you have an important asset that does not appear on your balance sheet: insurability. If the calculations show that you need substantial additional life cover, obtaining it now may be significantly easier and more affordable than trying to solve the same problem at age 70. A deterioration in your health could also make additional cover more expensive, restricted or even unavailable.

By dealing with this now, you can preserve a treasured family asset while still treating both children fairly.