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Comment by SlyShy | Hacker News Reader

As an 18 year old reading this sort of writing makes me want to leave the country. Except that I'd be taxed for ten years after expatriating, and there isn't any country that I know of as being similarly entrepreneurial. If anyone has suggestions, though, I would love to hear them.

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Sadly, other countries are generally worse than the US.

If you're nice, I'll let you live in my Seastead: http://seasteading.org/

You can't control everything. Stop worrying about things you can't change and start enjoying life.

This doesn't contradict what you said but: you can change what country you live in.

I'm pretty sure you don't get double-taxed on your first x dollars, where x is 80k or more if I recall.

If you can, do so. see what it's like. But don't burn your bridges.

If you do find some place better, that's good for you. If you don't? then you'll have a much better appreciation for your birth country.

Interesting. Are you sure taxation ends after 10 years?

I think it depends on if you have any financial dealings with the US. As long as you completely leave (no property, no loans, no investments, drawing no salary from the US, not paying into any of retirement benefits etc. etc.) then yea it will end.

On the other hand my mother hasn't lived in the US for close to 35 years now and she still has to file a tax return and pay a few bucks every year, due to still having some financial ties with US.

No, this is completely wrong. Filing has nothing to do with "having some financial ties with the US", it has to do with being a US citizen. You are double taxes with some extra write-offs [1]. The 10 year thing comes if you give up your citizenship for tax purposes (if you have over $2million in assets this is automatically assumed). In that case you are taxed at a higher rate for 10 years before finally getting off the hook. If you give up your citizen for other reasons then you only have to file for one additional year.

Oh yea, if you have $10k at any moment in the course of the year you must report all bank accounts where the money was (i.e. 3k in one account, 5k in another, 2k in a third, report all 3). You wont hear about this rule unless you live in a so-called "tax haven". Guess why that is.

[1] This is very complex. For a single earner you can take an exemption on the first ~$80k. In most of the US that's a lot of money. Not necessarily everywhere, so depending on where you live you may hit this pretty fast. Taking the exemption makes you unable to claim certain things so you can also chose not to take the exception and use a more complex form. I have a tax guy do this for me (takes him over 3 hours to go through the paper work) and costs about $1k/year.

yeah, after you forfeit your citizenship, the US expects you to keep paying income tax for ten years.

Only if you give it up for tax purposes.

Alternatively you could take some initiative and help make your current community and ultimately your country better.

The down votes on this make me sad, so I'm compeled to elaborate despite my better judgement.

Say you move to France because US taxes increase. It's great in France. Then they up taxes, so you move to Australia. Then Australia goes to war and you disapprove, so you move again. At what point do you stick it out?

I'm not saying your country or city of origin is by default the best region for you to live. But the only reason there are great places to live is because intelligent, creative, passionate people found a community they cared about and they stayed to work through the difficult problems. You could be one of these people... or you could move to a country with currently lower taxes.

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