“I worked in banking. I still got caught out by a surprise tax bill from a country I'd left years ago. That's when I stopped outsourcing my understanding.”
I grew up in Kuwait • a tax-free country. My parents built their careers there. Nobody in my family had ever filed a tax return.
Then I moved to India to study, then work. A company accountant filed my taxes and pointed me toward “lower-tax” mutual funds. What he didn't account for: I was a dual resident. Those investments made no sense for someone who might leave. I didn't know that. He didn't ask.
Five years later, I moved back to Kuwait, then to the UK. And one day, a surprise bill arrived from the Indian income tax department • a matured FD I'd forgotten, quietly accumulating liability while I was busy settling into a new country.
I had an accountant in India, one in the UK, and zero clarity about my actual financial position across both. I was paying people to manage pieces of a puzzle nobody was seeing whole.
We launched beta on Jan 31st. Settel handles multi-country tax across the US, UK, India, and UAE • the countries where the three-country problem hits hardest.
