If you were still employed in the UK, the system would be doing a significant amount of the heavy lifting for you, automatically, whether you thought about it or not.

Under auto-enrolment, a minimum of 8% of your qualifying salary is going into your workplace pension every single month. At least 3% of that comes directly from your employer, money that is essentially part of your compensation package, paid on top of your salary and invested on your behalf. On top of that, your National Insurance contributions are building your entitlement to the State Pension.

You didn’t have to think about it. You didn’t have to make a decision. The system made it for you.

Here, there is no auto-enrolment. There is no employer pension contribution landing quietly in an account each month. There is no State Pension clock ticking away in the background. The responsibility sits entirely with you and for many expats, that responsibility is going unmet.

This is not a comfortable question, but it is the right one.

For a significant number of expats, the honest answer is: not very much. The tax-free salary arrives, the lifestyle expands to meet it, and what is left if anything, sits in a current account earning close to nothing.

Think about that for a moment. If your savings were an employee working for you, would you be satisfied with their performance? They show up every day, they never complain, they do exactly what they’re told and they produce a return of 0% per annum. You wouldn’t accept that from any other area of your professional or personal life. So why are you accepting it from your money?

Cash sitting idle is not neutral. Once you account for inflation, it is actively losing purchasing power year on year. The longer it sits, the more ground it loses.

The financial advantage of living and working in the Middle East is real and significant. No income tax. No capital gains tax on most investments. The ability to save and invest a far higher proportion of your salary than would ever be practical back home.

But this window has a closing date. At some point you will return. Or circumstances will change. Or the opportunity will simply run its course. And when that happens, what you have built during this period or failed to build, will define the choices available to you.

The expats who use this time well are the ones who treat their surplus income not as spending money but as working capital. They invest consistently, they plan for the currency they will eventually need, they think about retirement provisions they are no longer building automatically, and they protect themselves with the right structures and the right advice.

The expats who don’t are the ones who find themselves, five or ten years later, with a lifestyle they have enjoyed but a financial position that has barely moved.

There is no single right answer, because everyone’s situation is different. But some questions are worth asking yourself honestly:

Do you have a clear investment strategy, or is your money sitting in cash? Are you making voluntary National Insurance contributions to protect your State Pension entitlement while you are abroad? Have you reviewed your UK pension pots and made sure they are working as hard as possible in your absence? Do you have the right protection in place, income protection, critical illness, life cover, given that the safety nets you had at home no longer apply in the same way?

If the answer to most of those is no, or I’m not sure, then the wealth window is open but you are not yet climbing through it.