JUNE 2020 EDIT: Unfortunately, we can no longer recommend Taxes for Expats. We ended up not having a good experience with them. If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email.
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Taxes. Everyone’s favorite subject. :)
I’ve always been proud to do our taxes myself, but our situation has been pretty simple in the past. This year, things are different. Living in Mexico this past year has complicated our taxes and I figured it’d be best to leave it to the experts!
In preperation for tax season, I did a lot of research for a good company that does taxes for expats. Specifically, I was hoping to find a company that:
- Made things easy for their clients — I didn’t want to have to do 75% of the work in communicating and preparing things, I wanted it to be as straightforward as possible.
- Was available to answer any questions — I wanted to fully understand our situation and not have to worry that maybe we were doing something that would affect our taxes.
- Had experience with our situation — There are many well-qualified tax advisors in the US, but it’s more rare to find one that has experience with preparing taxes for expats.
One of the first companies I came across was Taxes for Expats (TFX) (great name, right?!) and after reading great reviews about them and seeing that they were in line with the things we were looking for, I reached out with a question about taxes for digital nomads in Mexico. They not only answered that question, but also asked if we’d like to partner to write this post. :)
Taxes for Expats (TFX) is 100% dedicated to preparing taxes for people living abroad, which has given me so much peace of mind that not only are my taxes being handled by a professional, but also they have decades of experience with people in similar situations as ours.
We didn’t realize this when we moved to Mexico, but a few months in we found out about something called the foreign earned income exclusion (FEIE). This is where, if you spend at least 335 days outside the United States in a 365 day period, you can potentially have some federal taxes reduced! This is in part because you aren’t using facilities such as roads that tax dollars go to. If you’re an American expat, I highly recommend looking into this — we had no idea about it prior to moving and are so glad we heard about it!
Taxes for Expats (TFX) offers three levels of tax consultations, from a free intro to a high level tax planning session. We decided to schedule a tax planning call with them to better understand the foreign earned income exclusion, and we were really impressed with their customer service. The call was super easy to schedule (we actually had to reschedule it and it was no problem at all – they were great about working around our schedule) and the CPA was very friendly and informed. He even helped us think through some additional things that could potentially reduce our taxes even more!
In addition to offering standard federal and state tax preparation, Taxes for Expats (TFX) can also provide many other services for American expats in complex tax areas — from the foreign earned income exclusion like us to military personnel and people with businesses abroad.
The process for tax preparation is super simple. You upload your tax information and documents in a secure server, and communicate through their portal so that everything is saved in one place. They take it from there! Since we are currently on a trip through Central and South America, it has been SO nice to only have to upload our information and not have to worry about the rest. I would much rather spend time traveling instead of preparing taxes!
If you are in a similar tax situation as us, I highly recommend scheduling a free consultation with Taxes for Expats (TFX). And if you have any questions about our experience with them, feel free to reach out anytime!
