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FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

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Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#171

Post by praestigiare »

eralps wrote: post #29

I am a green card applicant basically waiting to become a US citizen in the next 5 - 10 years. Comments are mostly blaming the person for not renouncing it but is renouncing really necessary? If I end up going back to the country I was born in and leave the US what benefit do I have as a US citizen? This has been a scary scenario for a long time for me and I don't think I would be able to pay tax to the US with my in…

Realistically, it does not matter whether you apply for citizenship for not. All the same regulations will apply to you, including the exit tax, as a green card holder.

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#172

Post by wenc »

wheybags wrote: post #86
elgatonegro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying property doesn't expose you to GILTI/transition taxes. Neither does investing in a business. You just have to pay taxes on income derived from that business, as normal. FATCA can be completely nullified by not maintaining foreign bank accounts. Keep your money in the US, problem solved. Maybe that's not an option for everyone but it's still an option.

> FATCA can be completely nullified by not maintaining foreign bank accounts. That is not even remotely feasible. You pay forex fees every time you buy milk? Lots of government stuff / utility companies will only accept local bank accounts. The hassle and expense of having only a foreign bank account in a foreign currency is massive.

As someone who's lived abroad several times in my life, I agree. I've always had local bank accounts in my countries of residence.

That said, I have recently heard of a new product called the Transferwise Borderless Account that lets you hold money in different currencies, and along with the provisioning of local banking IDs in several jurisdictions like the EU, UK, Au/NZ, Hungary, Romania, Singapore and the U.S. It also comes with a debit Mastercard.

Any thoughts about this?

https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#173

Post by hef19898 »

samus wrote: post #144
hef19898 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some citizenships you cannot loose, I think Afghanistan is one such case. And Austria as well. The latter are also really picky with dual citizenship.

Austrian citizenship is quite easy to lose: by acquiring another, which is in almost all cases seen by Austrian law as incompatible with the Austrian one. As you say, dual citizenship is usually only possible if jus sanguinius applies. Source: https://www.wien.gv.at/amtshelfer/dokumente/urkunden/staatsb...

Ah, that was it! Thanks for correcting me! Kind of mixed things up in my head... picky Austrians!

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#174

Post by mindslight »

gok wrote: post #98

The reason these laws exist at all is the moral outrage over rich Americans illegally hiding their money overseas. Predictably, the laws have had limited effect on rich tax evaders and huge negative impact on millions of non-rich expats. In general one should be extremely skeptical of regulations which are sold as "not even applying to most people," as the unintended consequences will almost certainly hurt a lot of p…

The laws have limited effect on rich tax evaders by design. FATCA explicitly exempts reporting of directly held fine art. Is there any better medium for committing tax evasion?

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#175

Post by throwawayiionqz »

praestigiare wrote: post #170

A lot of people in this discussion are unaware of the scope of the difficulty and dismissive of the extent of the problem. While the article focuses on the plight of "accidental Americans," the burdens they face are the same faced by all Americans living abroad, and that is not a small number of people. The number of American citizens living overseas is somewhere between 6 and 9 million last I read. That is around 2%…

Thanks for putting this into words so clearly.

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#176

Post by centimeter »

j4yav wrote: post #148
centimeter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out that when you have 330M people with completely incompatible ethnocultural backgrounds, you end up with an untenably wide variance in political beliefs. Europeans take note; this is where many of you are heading.

Isn't this essentially exactly what they for some period said of every new ethnic or religious group in the US going back to before it was even an independent country? Catholics, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Russians, Muslims, Mexicans, and Italians have all had or are having their time of being seen an existential foreign threat, irredeemably incompatible and insidiously perverting the pure culture (at least by some), and…

> Isn't this essentially exactly what they for some period said

Yeah, and they were mostly correct. That's how we ended up with the situation we have today. That's literally the point of my post.

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#177

Post by centimeter »

whynotminot wrote: post #149
nverno wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply a general mistrust of big centralized government doesn't sound so negative.

General mistrust is fine. I'm a hedonist liberal and I still want lots of transparency and good oversight of my government. My populist friends and colleagues don't want good government. They barely want any functioning government.

I think your political classifications are whack; your descriptions of what you call "populists" don't ring true at all.

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#178

Post by whynotminot »

centimeter wrote: post #177
whynotminot wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General mistrust is fine. I'm a hedonist liberal and I still want lots of transparency and good oversight of my government. My populist friends and colleagues don't want good government. They barely want any functioning government.

I think your political classifications are whack; your descriptions of what you call "populists" don't ring true at all.

You keep critiquing other people’s definition of populism but you’re not providing your own.

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#179

Post by dkarp »

dctoedt wrote: post #11
dunce2020 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_baby but on accident.

It's BY accident; "on accident" is incoherent gibberish, no matter how many young whippersnappers imagine that it's clever of them to "evolve" the language in this way. (And get off my lawn while you're at it ....)

It’s a common mistake by non native English speakers. There are many non native English speakers on the internet. Go easy, it’s not necessarily what you assumed

Re: FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

#180

Post by voisin »

kingosticks wrote: post #116
C4K3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A surprising number of Americans seem to think it's reasonable to tax non-residents, so such legislation may be hard to get passed. If you support such legislation, consider supporting lobbying groups such as American Citizens Abroad https://www.americansabroad.org/

If wonder if all those same Americans would think it reasonable the non-resident tax payers finally got something for their tax returns/hoop-jumping, in the shape of coronavirus support cheques. Thanks to that I think I've almost broken even. Apart from all the wasted time, of course.

If your total lifetime costs to date of compliance as an American abroad amount to the coronavirus support cheque value, you should be running a popular YouTube channel teaching others. For most people in this situation that I know, the costs are $4-6k per year, minimum. Heaven forbid they try to make use of their local country retirement schemes, or have anything but the basic banking services and do not participate in partnerships or other “complicated” legal entities.
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