[brobinson]

There's also FATCA, FBAR, and a bunch of other nonsense you still have to deal with. Lots of foreign banks won't do business with Americans. You're also paying for an unnecessary tax return preparation each year. Renouncing in light of all this stuff makes sense for a lot of people.

[gregjor]

TurboTax has the FEIE worksheet and forms.

If you make enough money that renouncing citizenship looks like a good option the cost of tax preparation and opening a foreign bank account are going to be trivial details someone else will handle for you.

It’s a hassle for Americans to open bank accounts in some countries because of IRS reporting, but if you have a few million dollars to deposit you won’t have any problems.

[toastal]

TurboTax lobbies to keep the taxes overly complex so they can sell their services, so actually screw them. Almost all of their competitors don't offer service to those without a US address and US filing so your other choice is hiring a CPA.

[gregjor]

Nomads and expats should keep a US address and bank account. It makes everything simpler. You don’t have to tell the IRS or your bank your moved overseas. No one comes looking for you, no reason to complicate your life with foreign addresses.

Intuit may be an evil company, that’s a different subject. But their TurboTax product does handle the FEIE, which is the point I meant to make. You don’t have to hire a tax pro for that, though it may be worth it for complex tax situations or if you have income over $200k/year.

[toastal]

Paragraph 1 & 2 are definitely relate though. I just want to pay the bill and TurboTax has a line that says something to the effect of "Yes! You can pay the service if you use a US-based bank" while you go to the next screen where credit card is the only option and they will not accept cards from US-based banks with a foreign address. I canceled my old credit card when it expired because I wanted to simplify my life having less accounts, to not support their business and the shoddy support on Firefox/Linux from them, and to just have less entities tracking me. Now I have to go beg for a favor from family in the US to borrow credit card details pay for the privilege to give the government money. I tried doing taxes by hand two years ago and it was such a mess and I couldn't verify correctness with my situation that I had to bow out to a service.