The two-wills strategy: why one will is rarely enough when your assets cross borders
Estate planning insight · April 2026
If you own property in New Zealand and Australia, or you’re a New Zealand resident with assets back home in the Pacific Islands, one will is almost certainly the wrong answer. Here’s why - and how to fix it before it costs your family.
By Ross Holmes
Managing Director, Ross Holmes Virtual Lawyers Limited · practising New Zealand and Cook Islands lawyer since 1973
Most New Zealanders think of estate planning as a single will, signed once, that covers everything they own. For someone whose assets are entirely in New Zealand, that’s correct. But for a growing share of the New Zealand population — people with Australian holiday homes, Pacific Island family land, UK property held since they emigrated, business interests across the Tasman — one will quietly creates a problem their family won’t discover until it’s too late to fix.
The problem has a name: resealing. And the cost of getting it wrong is measured in months of delay and thousands of dollars in legal fees in two countries instead of one.
The cross-border problem in plain terms
When someone dies, the executors of their will need to obtain probate — a court order recognising the will and authorising the executors to deal with the deceased’s assets. Probate is granted by the courts of one country at a time. A New Zealand grant deals with New Zealand assets. An Australian grant deals with Australian assets. They don’t automatically reach across borders.
If a New Zealander dies owning a Bay of Plenty home and a Gold Coast apartment, leaving one will, the executors face a choice. They can either:
• Apply for probate in one country (say New Zealand), then apply to reseal that grant in the other country (Australia) so it has effect there too — or
• Apply separately for probate in both countries
Either way, two sets of legal fees. Two timelines. Two filings. And a coordination problem that family members, who are also grieving, have to navigate.
The two-wills strategy
The fix has been quietly used by experienced estate lawyers for decades. Instead of one will trying to cover assets in multiple jurisdictions, the testator makes two wills, one for each country:
• A New Zealand will, drafted under New Zealand law, dealing with all assets except those situated in the foreign jurisdiction
• A separate will under the foreign jurisdiction’s law, dealing only with assets situated there
Each will is granted probate independently in its own country. There’s no resealing. There’s no waiting for one country’s probate to land before the other can start. Families in each country can deal with their assets in parallel.
“Two wills, drafted carefully so they don’t overlap or revoke each other, give the family two parallel grants of probate in two countries. That’s much faster, much cheaper, and much cleaner than the alternative.”
Why resealing is getting worse, not better
Resealing in New Zealand is governed by section 71 of the Administration Act 1969. The High Court of New Zealand can reseal a grant of probate from a foreign court if that foreign court is in a Commonwealth country, or in the Republic of Ireland, or in a country that has been declared eligible by Order in Council (currently, only Hong Kong).
Section 71(1) · Administration Act 1969 (NZ)
Where any probate or letters of administration granted by any competent court in any Commonwealth country (other than New Zealand) or in the Republic of Ireland are produced to and a copy thereof deposited with any Registrar of the High Court of New Zealand, the probate or letters of administration may be sealed with the seal of the last-mentioned court…
That sounds straightforward. In practice, two things have made resealing slower and more expensive than it used to be.
The first is the move to electronic probate. New South Wales now issues grants of probate electronically. The New Zealand court system, by contrast, still requires physical, sealed, paper copies for resealing. Family members are left to arrange for the New South Wales Supreme Court to produce a hard-copy version of an electronic grant — an additional process, an additional fee, and an additional delay.
The second is the geographic limit. Resealing under section 71 applies only to Commonwealth jurisdictions. That includes Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and the Cook Islands and Niue as part of the Realm of New Zealand. For grants from Tahiti, New Caledonia, American Samoa, French Polynesia, or any other non-Commonwealth Pacific territory, resealing is simply not available. The only option is to apply for a fresh New Zealand grant of probate, which means proving the foreign will under New Zealand law, often months of court time, and several thousand dollars in legal fees.
For families with assets in those non-Commonwealth jurisdictions, the two-wills strategy isn’t merely cheaper. It’s the only practical way to avoid a New Zealand probate process that doesn’t fit the family’s situation.
Who actually needs two wills?
The two-wills strategy is right for more New Zealanders than most people realise. In our practice, the most common situations are:
• NZ residents with Australian property. A NZ home and an Australian holiday house, or NZ shares and an Australian rental investment. Two wills cover each cleanly.
• Pacific Islander families now resident in New Zealand. Many of our clients have lived in New Zealand for decades but still hold leases, family land interests, bank accounts, or business interests in the Cook Islands, Niue, Sāmoa, Fiji, or Tonga. A New Zealand will can’t deal with those assets effectively. A separate will under the law of the home country can.
• Returning Kiwis with UK or Hong Kong property. A United Kingdom or Hong Kong will dealing with foreign assets, plus a New Zealand will for the New Zealand assets, avoids resealing complications entirely.
• Trans-Tasman couples. One spouse in New Zealand, the other in Australia, joint and separate assets in both. Two wills per spouse, drafted to coordinate, is the clean structure.
The drafting matters
The reason most lawyers don’t suggest the two-wills strategy is that it requires careful drafting. Both wills have to coordinate — each must clearly limit itself to assets situated in its own jurisdiction, and neither must inadvertently revoke the other. A standard "I revoke all former wills" clause in the second will, used without modification, would wipe out the first will the moment the second one was signed.
The drafting solution is straightforward when done by a lawyer who has done it before: each will is expressly limited in geographic scope, the revocation clauses are limited to wills that deal with assets in the same jurisdiction, and the executors are chosen to make cross-border administration as simple as possible.
That’s exactly the situation where Ross Holmes Virtual Lawyers Limited — with fifty years of estate practice and specific cross-jurisdictional experience, including the Pacific Islands — produces a better outcome than either a single overstuffed will or two unrelated single-jurisdiction wills.
What this means for you
If you own assets only in New Zealand, one will is right. Don’t over-complicate.
If you own assets in two countries — even just a holiday home, a small lease, or a bank account in your country of birth — the question worth asking is: "if I died next month, would my family want to deal with one country’s probate process, or two?"
The answer, almost always, is two. And the two-wills strategy is what makes that possible.
Sort your multi-jurisdictional wills
If you have assets in two jurisdictions, get in touch with Ross Holmes Virtual Lawyers Limited. We’ve been preparing coordinated multi-jurisdictional wills for New Zealanders, Australians, and Pacific Islanders for fifty years.
reception@rossholmes.co.nz · +64 9 415 0099
About the author
Ross Holmes has practised as a lawyer in New Zealand since 1973. He is the Managing Director of Ross Holmes Virtual Lawyers Limited, a contributing author of the LexisNexis textbook Law of Trusts, and co-author with the late Professor Ron Crocombe of Southern Cook Islands Customary Law. RHL’s self-service legal documents platform is DYOdocs.
