Serbinski Accounting Firms

"For a property to be tax-exempt in US, it must have been one's residence for 2 of the last 5 years, which, in this home's case, it was not." The house was sold in March 2006. Five years back from that is March 2001. It was bigrandy's residence from March 2001 through July 2003, which is m...

Nelson, all property sales are NOT reportable on a 1040. Look at Worksheet 2 in Pub 523. It says clearly, "If the amount on this line is zero, do NOT report the sale or exclusion on your tax return." If the house fits under the guidelines, the IRS does not want to know. The original poster...

[quote="bigrandy"]I am a US citizen residing in Canada. All my income is from Canada. I am selling my home in South Carolina for a loss. I am reporting the loss on my US 1040. I have never rented the home out and it was my prime residence for 3 years until my move to Canada in July 2003. I...

IIRC (but you can't hold me to this because I haven't checked) anything up to twice the mandated withdrawal from the RRIF is considered periodic. Over and above, it's a lump sum and subject to the 25% rate. For a young person, it will take forever on this sort of schedule. Even a 40 year old has a m...

Speaking of spam, almost 2000 of the current registered members have registered only to game search engines. Take a look through the membership list for those who have websites in their profiles but have never posted once. Leaving those links intact is an advertisement for spam. Leaving them intact ...

I guess the point is that I don't check in often enough to see the deleted spam.

Lately, the forum has been getting the occasional bits of spam. Some get tacked onto existing threads (see http://forums.serbinski.com/viewtopic.php?p=7532#7532 for example). Some are their own threads (see http://forums.serbinski.com/viewtopic.php?t=1943 for example). My opinion is that posts like ...

(1) an average income tax liability of $127,000 for tax year 2005 (or higher amount for later years) for the 5 prior years (this sets the bar pretty low. Anyone leaving the tech sector in Silicon Valley would surely hit this?) I could be wrong about this, but I don't think there are that many Silic...

Nelson is right about Vanguard. They don't want a Canadian address on their books. Selling you a fund - even letting you reinvest if you want to be hyper-technical - is a violation of the Securities Act in your province, because Vanguard funds are not registered for sale anywhere in Canada. Sell the...

You can keep an IRA (or ten IRAs if you like).

You can't keep a taxable account in the US. The broker doesn't want to get slapped by a securities commission. Is there something stopping you from moving the securities to a Canadian broker?

thegarnetgroup wrote:I would also suggest that if you've been contributing in a 401k it would be a good idea to roll those asstes into your IRA.

Why?

All I would say is to nail down absolutely whether or not your IRA manager will allow you to keep your account active when you leave US, but do so BEFORE leaving. That's good advice but you need to be very careful about your tactics. If you call the broker or fund company before you leave the US, t...

In retrospect, I should have handled this more simply than I did. My IRA is only a small piece of my portfolio, about 2%. Instead of running the risk that a broker like TD would go insane about Canadian residents - which they almost did in 2000 - I should have handed the account to Vanguard, put it ...

I have an IRA at TD, they know I'm in Canada, and they haven't given me any grief about the account or trading in it since 2000. I'm a little concerned about the Ameritrade takeover but my plan is to deal with problems if they arise.

It's 15%. If you have a Schedule 1 that shows 16%, don't use it. Download a good copy from CRA's website.