vijayvijayakv

I am a UK national currently living in Asia. I will be moving to USA temporary for 3 years on an assignment. I have dealing and nominee accounts In UK with a shares in several companies. I understand many UK share brokerages refuse to deal with US residents. I desperately want to hold on to my UK shares.

Any advice and pointers from the forum members will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

SanDiegogirl

We have never had a problem with our brokerage company when dealing with buying/sellling shares in our pension fund and we live in the US.

You need to ask your brokerage firm what their policy is.

Yorkieabroad

Some of the online trading firms have global accounts. When etrade uk closed, we just opened a global trading account with etrade US and transferred the shares there.

You need to be aware that a lot (most?) UK companies will remove you from their DRIP programs once you become US resident. Maintaining a UK correspondence address may avoid this, though not sure whether it is strictly legal...

Pulaski

There is nothing illegal per se about US residents holding brokerage accounts outside the US, and non-US brokers only close accounts of US residents because of the massive regulatory burden of compliance with SEC regulations, which is mandatory whether or not the broker has a presence in the US.

So long as you accept that (i) you will not be "protected" by SEC regulations, and (ii) that if your broker somehow finds out you are in the US and may summarily close your account at short notice, there is no risk of legal sanction against the account holder, ..... of course presuming that they pay all the necessary taxes to the IRS, and complete your FATCA form each year.

Yorkieabroad

Indeed. We operated the Etrade UK account for a few years while we were here, and had a US correspondence address on it. No problems, although they did frequently balls up whether dividends were qualified or not on the end of year documents....

JAJ

Most brokers will not open new accounts for U.S. residents (or non-U.K. residents in general), for the reasons discussed on this thread, and others. Some brokers may be fine for you to keep your account, some may want to freeze it, and some may want to close it. Your mileage may vary.

It would be recommended to at least consider some sale and repurchase transactions (if you have unrealized capital gains as calculated in USD) to re-set the cost base before you become U.S. tax resident. This protects you from an unnecessary U.S. tax cost if either a. your broker forces closure of the account, or b. you decide to remain in the U.S. long term.

Will you be getting tax advice/planning as part of your U.S. move? If so, this is one of the issues to consider as part of pre-move tax planning (there are specific requirements to re-set the cost base from a U.S. perspective). Also, you need to consider the capital gains position in both the U.K. and your current place of residence.

Yorkieabroad

I'd forgotten about it, but wife reminded me.....when we first got here, I was holding a few shares in a First Direct brokerage account. They froze the account, and wouldn't let me buy any more shares, which wasn't a problem as I also had the Etrade account at that time. It was only some time later, when I came to sell some of the FD shares, that I found they had also removed my telephone dealing authorisation, so all sales had to be conducted by letter!! That was a pain!

vijayvijayakv

Further to my original post, my UK brokerage confirmed that they will close my account if I move to US but can facilitate transfer of shares to another broker ( for a fee of course). I have an account in Charles schwab in US and they have a facility to hold big company foreign ( non-US) shares. I will need to investigate foreign exchange implications etc on dividends, share values etc.

At least i need not sell all my UK shares and incur capital gains etc