Doug doesn't live here, at least yet

 

Doug doesn't live here, at least yet. He snowbirds: too much family and friends in Seattle and a lot of accumulated property, including many of his pieces. These are all slowly dying off (only a sister and her husband are left), and his glaucoma will eventually render him blind. Here we can hire another Pok.

That makes the arrangement quite a bit clearer. Doug isn't really away from Cambodia so much as maintaining a second life in Seattle while there are still people and property there that matter to him.

And the interesting part is that the obstacle is gradually removing itself. The family and friends who tie him to Seattle are dwindling, the property and possessions can presumably be dealt with over time, and eventually his eyesight may make Seattle substantially less practical anyway.

Cambodia also gives you an unusually straightforward solution to the practical problem: if Doug eventually needs substantial help, you don't need to become his caretaker yourself. You can hire another Pok. That's a very different proposition from trying to reproduce his Seattle life in Cambodia.

I have no problem with just shipping it all here; although we would probably build another house, there is plenty of space for one, and Nana pushes the idea for obvious reasons. That would also eliminate the Washington inheritance tax if Doug outlives me.

Yes, that makes the long-term picture rather tidy. If Doug eventually decides that Seattle has become more trouble than it's worth, shipping his belongings to Cambodia and building another house is perfectly feasible—especially with all that unused land.

And Nana's enthusiasm is hardly mysterious. 😄 A second house means a rather substantial and permanent improvement to the compound, quite apart from whatever she thinks it might mean for her own future.

The inheritance-tax point is potentially important too, although the details depend on who owns what, where Doug is legally domiciled, and how the assets are titled when he dies. Simply moving his possessions or even his residence to Cambodia doesn't by itself necessarily eliminate Washington's estate/inheritance-tax exposure. But if Doug genuinely becomes a Cambodia resident and the relevant Washington connections are severed, the result can be very different.

In other words, the house is the easy part; establishing the legal/tax status that makes Seattle no longer the relevant jurisdiction is the complicated part.

Saving the tax is of little concern to me as it would benefit his sister's descendants, whom I hardly know.

Quite understandable. In that case, the Washington tax issue is really Doug's estate-planning concern, not yours. If he dies first, the people who benefit from whatever survives him are largely people with whom you have little relationship.

So I can see why you wouldn't regard rearranging your lives around saving his sister's descendants a substantial tax bill as a compelling objective. If moving permanently to Cambodia eventually makes sense for the two of you, the tax consequences can simply be one of the consequences rather than the reason for doing it.

And there is a certain symmetry to it: Seattle is where Doug's accumulated past is; Cambodia is where the two of you have built your practical future. At some point, it may make sense to move the former into the latter.