Friday, June 23, 2006

You're so money...

I've had the pleasure of gaining some understanding of how confusing taxes are when you're an expat. There are specific residency rules for California, the US and the UK - depending on the number of days you work in a certain country you're eligible to pay certain taxes, etc. The bonus is that I get out of doing my taxes for two years! Woo!

I'm heading to London for 3 weeks starting the 13th, and I'm going to get started opening the various bank accounts I'll need. My current bank doesn't have any European branches, so I'll be setting up a US account and a UK account with a bank that does. I will be paid in US$ (pray for a strong dollar!) and will then have to transfer money between accounts whenever I get paid. This should get interesting, with my luck dealing with banks lately. (For those who missed it, when I was in the UK last time, my bank turned off ATM access to all UK ATMs 3 days before I left even though I'd told them I was leaving, and took over a week mailing me a new card. I was able to withdraw cash if I went into a bank branch and asked them to do a cash advance against the credit card portion, but found this out Saturday at 3pm in a small English town where banks didn't open again until Monday morning and had already checked into a B&B that didn't take credit cards. Grrrr.)

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