Probably one of the least things you hear talked about when exploring the world of social media and foreign countries is how it affects your taxes. Now I’m not a tax expert, but my dad is! Ha ha. And this isn’t professional advice, but this is practical advice from one who’s been living outside of my home country since 2007. (Seriously, my dad’s professional was as a CPA or Certified Public Accountant).
We get a good amount of questions about the logistics of living abroad, and one of the biggest questions has to do with taxes. For years we did our own taxes in the U.S., and it felt fairy straight forward. Eventually we went to a quick and cheap pop-up accounting service to get our taxes done. But when we moved outside of the U.S., all of that changed. At first we moved to Brazil, and with the help of several others we were able to file taxes there as well as in the States. As a U.S. citizen, you still file taxes even when living abroad. We managed things on our own for years, until we moved to Japan.
In Japan, most Japanese employers take care of your Japanese taxes for you. Since we don’t work for a Japanese company, we had to file our own Japanese taxes. Japan and the U.S. have a tax treaty which allows what you pay in Japan as taxes to be discounted in the U.S. (in essence). So we did our best to figure that out, but it was quite complicated. There’s social security (pension) here, national health care, city taxes and the list goes on.
At that point, one of our close friends started using a tax service called Taxes for Expats and recommended them to us. He said they knew all the tax laws in the U.S. and how it related to Japan. They helped him do his taxes and make sure they were done right. This really sounded good to us, so we checked it out.
While it was more than we paid for the pop-up tax services we knew when we were in the States, the service was on another level entirely. They really knew their stuff. We were shocked (in the best way possible) to find out we were not receiving tax-benefits that we qualified for. Our first tax return with Taxes for Expats found us getting thousands of dollars back! And that was after paying for the services. They have personalized service, so you communicate with the same agent throughout the whole process. The agent recommended we go back and refile previous years, because we would also be entitled to a refund. And so we paid them to go back and refile, and it was well worth it!
Since then we’ve been using Taxes for Expats every year for our U.S. taxes. We personally recommend them to so many people that this year we joined their affiliate program and asked if we could get a special discount to offer to our friends. Normally you get $25 off your first tax return done within Taxes for Expats referral program, but they’re giving us (and you) and $50 discount if you sing up with them by April 30, 2025, then it will revert to the normal $25 discount (which is still nice). Use our link for the discount: https://www.taxesforexpats.com/ref/278
This can be such a confusing part about living abroad, but hopefully this helps makes your tax season go much more smoothly.