General News & Insights

If you are a non-resident alien or green card holder living in the United States you will have important decisions to make regarding your wealth management and inheritance tax planning.

While it is always a difficult subject to contemplate, thinking about the future and what will happen to your wealth and assets once you are gone is definitely something which requires forethought and advice from an international financial adviser, especially if you are living abroad.

So, here at Blacktower in the US, we have put together a short guide featuring some of the main considerations.

If you've recently moved to the US from Britain or another country and found the question of pension and retirement planning in your home country to be troublesome, be prepared: retirement planning in the US can be a complex process and making the most of the much-talked about Roth IRA is no different.

Understanding and structuring retirement and pension plans in the United States is a difficult and complex task even at the best of times.

In fact, it is little wonder that so few British expats are able to make sense of retirement planning in the US when even US citizens struggle to do the same without anything like the same level of cross-border tax and income reporting obligations.

Things can get even more complicated in the event that as an expat you decide to eventually retire outside of the US but have built up some eligibility for US Social Security benefits; what, ask many expat wealth management clients, are your rights and responsibilities in such a situation?

Tax season in the US is always challenging even at the best of times and particularly for expats, non-resident aliens, green card holders and dual citizens.

And the 2018/19 US government shutdown threatens to make things even more of a test. However, taxpayers should not be lured into thinking that the shutdown makes the urgency of their reporting obligations any less onerous.

Low staff levelsThere is a possibility that an IRS which is currently running at an alarming 12% staffing capacity, will be late in paying out refunds, but to use this as an excuse for tardiness would be a potentially costly mistake.

If you are living in the United States but are neither a US passport holder nor a green card holder, you will need to clarify your US taxation status.

In order to do this you will need to ask yourself several important questions including whether you can utilise any tax treaties.

Looking at tax treaties can help you determine your tax residency; to do this you will need to follow what is popularly known as Tie-Breaker Rules. However, it is important to understand that each tax treaty is different so your situation will depend on a close analysis of the provisions rather than any general piece of advice.

New Year's resolutions: everyone makes them but not everyone sticks to them.

When it comes to your financial and retirement planning, there is no substitute for being disciplined and organised and there is no better time to sort out your strategy than the advent of the New Year.

In fact, getting on top of your financial and retirement planning can pay-off in other ways by helping to clear your head and reduce your anxieties so that you can focus on other important details of your life.

Here we take a look at three things you can do to set the right tone for the year ahead.

Even before they disclose their particular circumstances and retirement goals, expats in the United States who are seeking cross-border financial advice bring a whole host of challenges to the wealth manager's table.

From stringent IRS reporting rules to concerns and confusion over the suitability of various retirement planning vehicles – for example, whether to choose a QROPS, SIPP, IRA, 401(k) or other account – trying to factor in every detail is an enormous responsibility for the 21st century wealth manager. Imagine then trying to juggle such challenges with the day-to-day responsibility of managing portfolios.

Is there a more dispiriting financial situation than working hard and investing intelligently for your assets only to have some or indeed all of them pinched from your back pocket by a sophisticated scam?

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recently warned against this possibility, calling on taxpayers to beware of "a surge of new, sophisticated email phishing scams", particularly during the Christmas and New Year period.

This warning follows IRS data charting how the incidence of online scams rose by 60% during 2018 – an especially dramatic rise when it is considered that each of the previous years recorded a decline. Furthermore, with the vast majority of scams occurring at the end and the beginning of the year, it is clear that the IRS message is timely.