Staying Put in the Gulf: The Money Questions Worth Settling Before They’re Urgent

September 2026

By Will Glyn

It is now seven months since the first strikes on Iran on 28th February. There was a ceasefire in April, a memorandum of understanding in June, and — in the words of the UK Foreign Office’s current advice — “strikes and retaliatory attacks by Iran in a number of locations across the region against US military and civilian infrastructure” since 8th July. Gulf News is publishing a daily “what UAE residents need to know” bulletin. Several European and Asian airlines have suspended Dubai flights into late October or early November, and Air Canada until mid-January, according to those bulletins. The US State Department has the UAE at Level 3, “Reconsider travel”. The Foreign Office has not advised against travel, but tells anyone going to “be prepared for possible flight cancellations, periodic airspace closures, and potential travel disruptions”.

In June I wrote about the people who left the UAE in the first weeks of the conflict and where they went. This piece is for the much larger group who didn’t — the ones with a job, a school place, a lease and a life, who have looked at the situation and decided that leaving is not the answer, but who would still quite like to sleep at night. Almost none of the conversations I’ve had with clients in the Gulf this month have been about whether to go. They’ve been about how to stay well.

So here are the questions I ask them. None is dramatic, all can be settled in an afternoon, and settling them is what turns “staying” from a gamble into a decision.

How much cash do you need — and can you reach it from anywhere?

The standard advice on an emergency fund — three to six months of spending — quietly assumes the emergency is losing a job, not leaving a country. An unplanned move is a different animal: flights at whatever price is on offer that day, somewhere to stay while you find somewhere to live, a deposit, school fees, and possibly a stretch with no income. For most families I’d want the fund sized for that, not for a redundancy.

Where it sits matters as much as how big it is. A UAE current account is linked to your residence visa: cancel the visa and, as Gulf News reported last week, some banks will restrict or freeze it unless you have arranged non-resident status first. And as The National’s guide to leaving the UAE puts it, every loan and card needs clearing before the account can be closed — ask for a no-liability letter when it is. That is a fine process when you are leaving in an orderly fashion, and a poor place to keep the money you’d need in a hurry. I’ve written before about banking in a third country, and this is exactly what that rule is for: a month or two of spending in the local account, and the rest somewhere that doesn’t care what your visa says.

Does your cover actually pay out in a conflict?

This is the question people are most nervous about asking, and the answer is better than most expect — with caveats worth reading twice. Insurers draw a line between active war risk (taking part in hostilities), which is essentially never covered, and passive war risk (being a bystander), which often is. Zurich’s published guidance for its Middle East protection policies says that for residents of the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar, “if your claim arises… as a bystander during hostilities, your claim will be honoured”, subject to the policy’s standard and specific exclusions, and that cover continues if you are evacuated or in transit through another country.

That is one insurer. Crowe UAE’s March note on the conflict and the regional insurance market found life policies generally do include passive war cover, “at times with caveats attached” — for instance, on group life schemes, if you travel into a recognised conflict zone after it has been designated one — while health policies commonly exclude war but must stabilise you after an injury, and personal accident policies do not normally cover passive war risk unless it is written into the policy terms. So pull out the exclusions page of every policy you hold and, if the wording is unclear, ask the insurer in writing before you need the answer. Pay particular attention to the war and civil-unrest wording on any travel insurance for trips within the region, and to whether your life cover changes if you relocate — I covered cover that travels with you in June.

Your gratuity is a promise, not a pot

Here’s the stat that surprises most people in the UAE. End-of-service gratuity under the labour law is 21 days’ basic pay for each of your first five years and 30 days’ for each year after that, capped at two years’ pay, according to Lux Actuaries’ summary of Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021. For most private-sector employers there is no separate pot: it is an unfunded liability on the company’s balance sheet, paid out of whatever cash the business has on the day you leave.

In normal times that’s a footnote. In a year when shipping and aviation across the region have both been disrupted, it means your gratuity depends on the health of your employer on the day you resign. Two things follow. First, ask whether your employer has joined the voluntary savings scheme introduced under Cabinet Resolution 96 of 2023, which replaces the lump sum with monthly contributions — 5.83% of basic salary in your first five years, 8.33% after that, per Bracewell’s summary — paid into regulated funds run by approved administrators rather than held by the company. If it has, your money is already out of the business. If it hasn’t, treat the gratuity as a bonus you hope to receive, not as a savings plan, and do not count it towards the emergency fund above. Second — and this catches people every year — a UAE bank can hold up the gratuity itself: The National reports that some banks automatically freeze the payout against a customer’s credit-card limit, whether or not anything is owed, and release it once the employer’s clearance letter arrives and all dues are settled.

The lease, the school fees and the loan

Most of the cost of leaving in a hurry isn’t the flight. It’s the commitments that don’t stop when you do. Rent in the UAE is commonly paid a year in advance, or in a handful of post-dated cheques, and breaking a lease early typically costs one to two months’ rent in penalties, according to The National. School fees are paid a term or a year ahead. A car loan or credit card will need settling before the bank lets you close the account.

None of that is a reason to leave or to stay. It’s a number, and I’d rather you knew it. Add up what walking away from every current commitment would cost, write it down, and you have two things at once: the true size of the buffer in the first question, and the reassurance that the figure is usually smaller than the dread suggests.

Decide your line in the sand while you’re calm

The families who handled the spring well were not the ones with the biggest bank balances. They were the ones who had already agreed, at the kitchen table, what would make them go — a school moving online again, an employer relocating, a change in their government’s travel advice — and where they would go if it happened. They knew which of them held the passports and the policy documents, and they had checked, in advance, that they could log in to their bank and their investment platform from abroad without a UAE mobile number in hand for the security codes.

A trigger chosen in advance is very different from a decision made at two in the morning after a news alert. The first is planning. The second is the expensive version of leaving I wrote about in June, where transfers and everything else get done at whatever price the moment demands.

Keep the security question and the investment question apart

They look identical at two in the morning. They aren’t. If your portfolio is held on an international platform in a stable jurisdiction — which is how we set things up for most clients in the region — nothing about the situation in the Gulf changes what it should own. It was never meant to depend on your address. What the conflict has done is push oil up and inflation with it, which is a large part of why the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve both raised rates this month — a global story about your investments that deserves a global answer, and one I’ve written about separately this week.

If instead your investments sit with a local institution, or your pension is with an employer scheme in the region, the question to ask is not “should I sell?” but “where are these assets actually held, and what would it take to access them from somewhere else?” It’s a question about custody, not about markets. Selling good investments because of where you happen to be living is the mistake I see most often in moments like this, and it’s the hardest one to undo.

How We Can Help

At Proctor Wealth Associates we work with clients across the UAE and the wider Gulf, and most of what’s above is a list we can take off your hands rather than add to it. We can help you:

• Size and place the emergency fund — working out what an unplanned move would cost your family, and holding that money in an international account that doesn’t depend on your visa.
• Check what your cover actually says — reviewing the war and territorial exclusions on your life, health and travel policies, and putting in place cover that follows you if you relocate.
• Stop relying on the gratuity — building a regular savings plan that sits outside your employer, so your retirement provision doesn’t depend on the company’s cash on the day you leave.
• Hold investments where you can reach them from anywhere — keeping your portfolio on an international platform in a stable jurisdiction, so a change of address needn’t mean a change of plan.
• Write the plan down — so that if the day comes, the financial side of the move is already decided and the only thing left to do is book the flight.

If you’re staying — and most of the people I speak to are — this is a conversation worth having once, calmly, so you don’t have to have it in a hurry. You can book a call with me and we’ll go through your own list together.

Will is an Independent Financial Adviser with over a decade of experience helping expats make the most of their international status.