I kept putting it off, but finally pulled the trigger last year and decided to drop mine. A year later I'm still working on it. So much paperwork, waiting, and a lot of money 😭
Discussion
Yikes. What’s the cost? Exit tax or lawyers and accountants?
Exit tax is coming. Lawyers and accountants, AND you must have a foreign passport before they let you give up your US one, so either wait a few years in another country, or pay $100k or more to buy citizenship elsewhere (plus more lawyers for that one).
😭 shit. What a pain. Good luck with it all.
I have New Zealand citizenship with a New Zealand passport. Having lived here and worked here for 18 years it was a reasonable move and I more than qualified. I paid NZ$470.20 for the citizenship and NZ$199.00 for the passport.
I'm not going to give up my US citizenship because that triggers a process where they put me under the microscope and while I think I'm clean, I don't want to risk some over-zealous IRS agent deciding to extort me, or some other agent deciding I said something online that makes me a special target of some secret government program. So I will keep filing my FinCEN and my US tax returns every year, where basically I owe $0 each time. PITA though.