Browse 7 Gruv blog articles tagged US Tax. Coverage includes Tax Residency & Compliance. Practical guides, examples, and checklists for cross-border payments, tax, compliance, invoicing, and global operations.
Use **Married Filing Separately (MFS)** as your default unless you can clearly support **Head of Household (HOH)** or you intentionally make the resident election and file jointly. The core tradeoff is straightforward: baseline filing treatment versus broader reporting while the election is in effect.
Yes, you can often keep a U.S. S Corporation after moving abroad, as long as the eligibility and ownership rules still hold.
Start by separating three decisions before you touch any forms: whether a foreign transfer is treated as a gift or bequest that is excluded from gross income, whether `Form 3520` reporting may apply, and when the facts are uncertain enough to require a qualified tax professional. The goal is documented judgment, not guesswork.
Low-drama expat investing works best in a fixed order: compliance first, operations second, optimization third. Choose **us expat investment vehicles** you can explain, maintain, and defend, then escalate when key facts are unclear.
Treat this as an operations problem. Confirm status, confirm obligations, document the trail, and escalate fast when facts get fuzzy. You are the CEO of a business-of-one, and this is a recurring compliance workflow you want to run on rails instead of rebuilding from scratch every year.
Use **FBAR signature authority** as a working label here. If you can control activity in a non-U.S. account you do not own, treat it as a reporting question that needs current-rule verification. This playbook helps you sort that question, gather the right evidence, and avoid making the call from memory or from a job title.
A **6013(g) election** lets some married couples treat a **[nonresident spouse](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/nonresident-spouse)** as a U.S. resident for tax purposes so they can file **Married Filing Jointly (MFJ)** instead of **Married Filing Separately (MFS)**. The core question is simple: does the benefit of joint filing outweigh the cost of pulling the nonresident spouse into broader U.S. tax reporting? For some couples, MFJ improves the result. For others, it creates more exposure than value. As a practical default, you should not elect until you have modeled both filing paths and pressure-tested treaty and foreign-income consequences.