Comment on How can a US citizen invest outside the reach of the federal government?
JasminIstMuede@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days agoImportant note about this (though I don’t know how much you earn): you can only exempt up to 120000 dollar equivalent per year, and you must still file your taxes every year with the American government even if you don’t live there. Non-US bank accounts and investments also must be declared, even if you no longer live there.
I’m not American myself, but a colleague of mine is and she has mentioned having trouble with American agencies because some of these points (specifically the bank account point if I remember correctly).
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
sure, i can clarify those for you up here as well.
the max excluded income is variable, so this year it’ll be $126,500. the cap is regulated by the irs and goes up each year.
the FEIE(foreign earned income exclusion) form is form 2555, which you fill out with your regular taxes. it’s a very simple couple of pages that you fill in the blanks with the dates you were out of the country and your total earned income for the year, usually takes me fifteen minutes.
the declaration of foreign investment you mentioned is called the FBAR, an online form that takes less than a minute to fill out If you have more than 10,000 invested overseas.
If you have more than 10,000 USD invested overseas, you have to annually declare how much and which financial institutions your savings are in via the FBAR.
as long as you take the 10 to 15 minutes to fill out the FEIE, you won’t have any problems with the IRS excluding earned income.
JasminIstMuede@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Thank you for the corrections! I had no idea it was so simple. I think my colleague had problems because she wasn’t aware of the FBAR for a few years.
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
oh yeah, that’ll do it.
it’s funny, there’s actually a built-in option in the form for filing the fbar late because you didn’t know about it, I assume because late filings happen so often.
ECB@feddit.org 23 hours ago
I file late kist about every year…