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Comment by tcoff91 | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that you only pay taxes to USA while living abroad if you move somewhere with lower income taxation than the USA, in which case you deduct the taxes paid to the other government from US taxes and pay the difference. This means most people don’t have to pay taxes to the USA while abroad because most countries tax you more than USA federal income tax rates.

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That is not how it works. No matter where you reside, you MUST file a tax return every year. There is something called the Foreign Earned Income Exemption (FEIE), which is relatively significant but only applies to the first $100,800 USD to earned that year, and does not apply to limits on taxation against foreign owned assets.

If you are making a senior engineer salary at a US company but living abroad, you will be taxed quite heavily since you'll need to pay taxes in your country of residence, plus be taxed on income at the higher brackets over $100k in the US.

From your other comments it seems like you're well versed in this stuff, but here there's some missing nuance.

Most countries have double taxation treaties.

1. If the tax rate is lower in your host country, you pay tax on income greater than 100K minus whatever tax you paid in your host country. Let's call the US tax rate 35 and the host country 30%, and your income 110: You pay 5% to the US, e.g. 500 USD (plus, probably a similar amount to a tax advisor)

2. If the tax rate is higher in your host country, you deduct your host countries taxes from your US tax and only pay the tax advisor.

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