and tax return done

[julesjones]

The UK tax return, that is. The US one still awaits me...

Since the filing cabinet's getting a bit full, I thought I'd do a bit of a weed on the older files in there. That includes ancient market guidelines from ten years ago, when I was amusing myself with the erotica short story markets. And yes, I do mean actual porn here in some cases, although some of the niche fetish markets tended to be oddly sweet in their way. I always meant to try some of those as a writing exercise, but of course once I found a market for the novellas and short novels that are my natural length, that's what I focused on.

Just looked up one of those niche fetish markets. It's long gone, which is a shame, because I'm pretty sure that's one where even though it's not my kink (or even gender orientation), I still enjoyed the art and stories as art. The site url is still there, but now it's your bog-standard porn cumshot site, and if the original site content was ever archived I can't find it. Of course, the markets newsletter where I found it in the first place has also gone the same way, although at least there the archive still exists. Such is the way of the web.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

So why do you have to make tax returns both sides of the pond? And is it the same income you're declaring, and are you paying double taxes as a result...?

[julesjones]

Other Half and self have to pay US taxes to retain Green Card status while not being actually resident in the US. Which means filing in a US tax return. But because there is a double taxation treaty between the US and the UK, tax paid in one country counts towards tax owed in the other country. And as we are both domiciled in the UK and earning most of our income here, we pay our taxes here to HMRC, and offset that against whatever we would owe to the US IRS. Which tends to leave us owing nothing to the IRS, but we have to fill out their tax return so that they officially know this.

Yes, you probably will need to know about this sort of thing. There are manymanylots of sf writers where you are going who can help you with how the IRS stuff works, but there are also odd wrinkles about being a not-US-citizen. You're going to be on a different visa to the one I was on, so the rules will be different again -- hunt up someone in a similar visa situation to ask about the stuff the local tax advisers don't understand because they don't run into many people in that situation. (Other Half has a canned rant on the subject of tax advisers who advertise as specialising in migrant tax returns but miss simple stuff he found by reading a specialist book and getting a decent tax software package.)

Also see your UK accountant with a view to managing your UK tax affairs from the other end, because they will undoubtedly be Complicated. And you want to keep in mind what happens re: any opportunity for the two of you to move rightwards across the pond in search of jobs for Karen.

[pteppic.livejournal.com]

I'm self-employed, and director of a small company.
I couldn't survive without my accountant, so mega-plus-one to that piece of advice.