Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

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I have been thinking about giving up my citizenship too. I was born in TX in the late 80s but been living in Austria since the early 90s.

I recently married but it was not easy to do so because I was born in the US as the gov here didn't like my birth certificate (missing an "apostille") and I needed a document from the US that they couldn't give me in time (or at all because they said I need to be there in person but they're not open for in person visits) because of Corona.

I ended up finding a loop hole meant for war survivors that can't get a hold of documents which allowed me to marry my Austrian wife without the apostille.

Didn't get easier though because all shared banking accounts we have, she has to report to the IRS too, we both have to sign a waiver to be excempt from banking confidentiality and I have to send them my tax papers every year despite never having earned a single dime in the US any paying full taxes herein Austria.

Also Austrian banks and even European trading sites won't give me access to the stock market (they just say you were born in the US, we can't let you trade stocks over their platforms) but I don't have an address in the US so I can't do it on an US site either.

This article gives me less hope of fixing these things in the future

I think apostille birth certificates need to be ordered from the state governments, in this case Texas.

For anybody whose curious about apostilles (because in the US we generally don't need these):

Apostilles are signed by the secretary of state in the state in which you reside.

They can apostille any document, including ones they don't issue (e.g. you can get a birth certificate from NJ apostilled in NY or get a _foreign birth certificate_ from a tiny eastern european country apostilled in NY, neat!).

You apostille a document on top of getting it notarized by a public notary.

You need to travel to your capital to do this.

Typically, it can be done same-day (at least it can in NY and NJ).

I highly, *highly* recommend paying somebody to apostille your documents. They can almost always notarize them as well. It's a royal pain to do yourself otherwise.

Funny enough, getting apostilles is trivial in other countries and costs you nothing. Your documents often already include it and, if you reside in a foreign country, your country's embassy will notarize and apostille it for you. Not so in the United States.

It should be possible to get the birth certificate eventually, though Covid will slow things down.

My father died in Thailand without a will, and settling his estate involved proving that I was the only person left to inherit. That meant a very long chain of authentication of birth certificates, death certificates, and divorce documents.

For example, I ordered my grandmother's death certificate from the city of Chicago, got it authenticated by the Illinois Department of State, got that authenticated by the US Department of State, got that authenticated by the Thai embassy in the US, got that authenticated by the Thai government in Thailand.

Repeat for for another dozen documents. I was able to do it all remotely, by mail, but it took more than a year.

When it was all done, I went in front of a judge in Pattaya in Thailand. I was worried that some Thai lady would suddenly appear claiming to be his wife (I suppose that happens at least once a week there). But in the end it was anticlimactic.

Of course the actual solution is to get rid of US citizenship. In the meantime for things like stocks, can you use a mailbox address or get someone to let you use their address? You’d need some sort of documents to be linked to the address for manual verification if denied automatic acceptance by any platform.

It’s annoying but possible. If you don’t have any one you can try this with in the US, it’s a long shot, but m I wouldn’t mind helping out. You can see my bio on HN and from there you can see I use my real identity. To help with initial trust.

I'm not the parent, but I'm an American who has been living abroad for ten years.

The banks know where the commercial mailing/forwarding services are. They somehow keep a database of them. They're fine with you using a mail forwarding service as a mailing address, but they will want to see a residential address where you live. If you can't show a residential address in the United States, banks and brokers can and will freeze or close your account.

I've learned my lesson. Pro tip: never tell the banks that you're living abroad. You're always taking an extended vacation. And always have a trusted friend or family member whose residential address you can use in the United States even if all your physical mail gets sent to your mail forwarding service.

Yeah I assumed as much with the mail forwarding sort of places.

So yeah the solution is like you said in the last paragraph.

Doesn't saying that to a bank hurt your chances of claiming the Foreign Income Tax Credit?

To my (very) limited understanding, the IRS will use any means to say that you don't quality for this. This includes not closing out old driver's licenses, failing to submit mailing address changes, etc.

Have you tried getting a US address with a mail scanning service? Is that accepted by banks?

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