How long do you expect to remain abroad? How long do you expect to remain in your current position? By the time you read this you might be sitting in front of an ersatz Yuletide log fire, mildly plastered, thinking about what the new year might hold for you. More of the same? A dramatic change? A slight shift sideways?

Whatever you decide, having the infrastructure in place to allow you to do what you want is crucial. As expats, many of you might think you’re out of the recruitment loop. Sadly, that’s probably true. Jacqui Canham spent some time talking to international recruiters for this issue. What she found makes for sobering, if somewhat predictable, reading. To put it in a nutshell, although the big recruitment companies are global operations now – a CEO could well come from abroad, as a brief look at the FTSE shows – they are only human and rely on accurate intelligence as to who is out there, and what their skills are. If you are sitting overlooking the Square Mile it is going to be easier to get your profile in front of a headhunter than if you are in a foreign country.

Is all lost, then? No, it’s not. As the article shows, there are a few obvious things you can do to make sure you remain firmly in the loop.

Elsewhere, Tim Hyam looks at offshore trusts. Are they only for zillionaires? No, they’re not. But they take some understanding, which Tim provides.

Finally, we’ve put together a roundup of online shopping sites that offer speedy international shipping for “all your Christmas needs” as the marketers put it. From posh coffee to African sculpture you won’t have to stir from in front of your artificial log fire to make the loved ones happy.

In our news pages we report that a Belgian tax amnesty has singularly failed to net as much money as the Belgian authorities expected. This is not the first time this has happened. Italy tried the same thing, with little success. Germany did the same a couple of months ago – with an equal lack of return on effort. There are two possibilities: either there isn’t as much unpaid tax out there, which seems unlikely, or the attractions of repatriating investments are less than immense, which seems more likely.

Even so, these Revenue carrots should not be ignored. The alternative is a stick – which more revenue authorities are starting to wield. The UK Inland Revenue set up a specialist offshore tax investigation group last year with powers to look into all sorts of financial business, from credit card transactions to deposit accounts. Pay your tax, before you start receiving alarming letters.

As it’s coming up to Christmas, let me take this opportunity to express sincere envy and resentment that you might well be reading this somewhere beautiful and sunny, instead of staring out at the drizzle of London. I don’t’ know how many of you get back to the UK regularly, so yo might not be aware that it never snows here anymore, having ceased to do so somewhere around February 1975. You might, of course, be up a mountain somewhere up to your knees in the white stuff, in which case, there’s another reason for me to hate you.

Happy seasonal festivities.