Over the years, the same five mistakes account for most of the avoidable cost we see when a Latin American family establishes itself in the United States. None of them is exotic. Four of the five are sequencing errors: the family did the right things in the wrong order.
Mistake 1: forming the entity before deciding who will own it
A Florida LLC takes minutes to form online, which is exactly the problem. The document is trivial; the question of who the members are, and where they are tax resident, is not.
Families routinely form an entity in the founder's personal name because it was fastest, then discover a year later that transferring it into the intended holding structure is a taxable event, or triggers a filing obligation nobody planned for, or breaks the basis for the residency application already in progress.
Order of operations. Decide the ownership map first — who owns what, in which country, and why. Then form. An afternoon of planning routinely saves five figures of restructuring.
Mistake 2: assuming the home-country structure travels
A holding company that is efficient in Colombia, Ecuador or Panama is not automatically efficient once a United States asset or a United States person sits underneath it. Some structures that are entirely ordinary at home are treated in the United States as opaque vehicles carrying heavy reporting obligations and unattractive treatment.
The reverse is equally true. A clean United States structure can create a problem at home — controlled-foreign-company rules, transparency reporting, or a dividend characterisation that costs more than it saves.
This is the single strongest argument for having both jurisdictions in the room at once. Not sequentially. At once.
Mistake 3: treating residency as a separate project
Immigration counsel optimises for the visa. Tax counsel optimises for the tax. Nobody is paid to notice that the day a family member becomes a United States tax resident, the family's entire existing structure is re-characterised.
The consequential facts are not obscure. Becoming a US person changes reporting on foreign accounts and entities, changes how the home-country holding is viewed, and starts a clock on elections that are only available before residency, not after.
The window to plan is the year before the move, not the year of it. Almost everything gets cheaper if the structuring precedes the residency rather than chasing it.
Mistake 4: buying property personally because it closed faster
A family finds the apartment, the seller wants speed, and the purchase closes in a personal name with the intention of "moving it later". Later, moving it involves transfer taxes, potential recording costs, lender consent and — if a non-resident is involved — estate exposure that a modest amount of pre-planning would have avoided entirely.
Buying through the right vehicle from the start costs a few days. Fixing it afterwards costs real money, and sometimes cannot be fixed at all without triggering the very event you were avoiding. This is the mistake most likely to appear in a family's first year, and it is the one we see most often.
Mistake 5: no governance document until there is a dispute
The founder decides. That works, right up until the founder is unavailable, or two children disagree, or a spouse has a different view of the operating business.
A short family governance document — who decides what, what requires unanimity, how a family member exits a position, who speaks for the family to advisors — costs a fraction of one mediated dispute. It is also the item every family postpones, because it feels like planning for conflict rather than avoiding it.
The sequence that works
- Map what exists today: entities, assets, people, tax residencies, and where each sits. In writing. Most families discover something in this step.
- Decide the destination: who should own what, in which jurisdiction, in three years — before touching anything.
- Get both jurisdictions in one room and pressure-test the destination from each side.
- Sequence the residency against the structuring, not after it.
- Then execute: form, transfer, purchase, file.
- Document governance while everyone still agrees.
Steps one to four are cheap and produce no paperwork, which is exactly why they get skipped. They are also where the entire saving is.
This is an overview, not advice. Everything here depends on facts specific to your family, and none of it substitutes for admitted counsel in both jurisdictions. What a family office adds is making sure the right specialists are asked the right question in the right order — see legal advisory.