Help! Complicated tax questions
 

Hello - I'm trying to get my head around tax issues with our move. I appreciate this is a complex area and I will possibly need to take expert advice but I'm hoping someone may have encountered a similar situation previously and might be able to point me at the right sort of information.


My situation is as follows:


I am being made redundant - my official redundancy date and the current proposed date of my redundancy payment is mid Feb 2018. I may be able to bring this forward to an earlier date if it seems financially advantageous to do so.


I currently don't know exactly when work will let me go and on what basis - they might put me on garden leave soon or they might ask me to work up until mid-February.


We expect to have our Visas in hand by the end of October 2017 so in theory, if I am placed on garden leave, I could enter the US from around early November onwards. If this is possible I would like to do so as my husband flies out to start his now job this week (in Malvern, PA).


What I can't work out is whether I would take a substantial tax hit if my redundancy is paid out after I have entered the USA as a new resident. In the UK the first £30K of redundancy is tax free and I am worried that I would somehow lose the tax free status of this payment if it becomes taxable by the US rather than the UK - or that the whole redundancy payment would somehow be subject to double taxation because of the overlap in tax years and residency for tax purposes.


If anyone can shed any light on this I'd be very grateful!
Melly

Re: Help! Complicated tax questions
 

If you are a US resident when you receive income you are taxable by the US. As based on your previous posts your husband is a USC, he might have optimised his US returns for the past 10 years to generate the maximum excess foreign tax credit carryovers. When you file jointly in the future you may have more than enough excess foreign tax credits for this not to matter...