A Texan in Spain is counting on Pres. Trump to end the double taxation of Americans abroad

“In effect, the tax code for Americans abroad as it stands is unduly punitive from start to finish, and the effect it has is to hinder our current prosperity and future security.”

— Samantha Wasek

Dear Congress,

As a proud fourth-generation Czech-German Texan, I spent the entirety of my youth in my small, Houston-area town, growing up with cattle and maize all around, my years broken up by football season, baseball season, and summer vacations to Galveston and San Antonio. But when I started learning Spanish in high school, I became aware of a whole new world out there, and I couldn’t wait to learn more.

In college, I majored in Spanish, aiming to work as bilingual support for our communities in Texas, but was too shy to actually put the language into practice out loud. After years of studying Spanish on paper, I still couldn’t say that I was bilingual, so I decided to spend one semester studying abroad in Spain in order to immerse myself in the language and finally feel like I could call myself a Spanish-speaker. Unexpectedly, it was there that I fell in love with my now-ex-partner and decided to start my life in his hometown of Seville, Spain.

This was the year 2011, and though my life is now in Spain, my home is and always will be Texas. I still vote in Texas, and I still miss kolaches, enchiladas, and Dairy Queen steak fingers every week of the year. Half of my Spanish fiance’s clothes are from Buc-ee’s, and the other half are Astros caps.

10 years in Spain and counting

I’ve been a legal resident of Spain for well over a decade now, and while there are certain things about this country that many people love, the average salary here is certainly not something to write home about. For a large part of my time in Spain, I only earned about $12,000 a year. To make matters worse, the “love of my life” that I had moved abroad for wasn’t contributing to the household income. It was just me, trying to make ends meet for the two of us and funding his capricious whims while agonizing over how we were going to make the next month’s rent. 

My salary was, astonishingly, enough to get by - food, water, rent, and utilities -  but it wasn’t nearly enough to make plans for the future. I vividly remember the pride I felt when I finally had enough extra money to buy myself a $20 pair of cleats at the sporting goods store so I could play on my softball team without slipping over the astroturf.  Every summer that I went home (on a flight paid for by my parents), I would bring back a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from my mother.

Around the same time I ended that dead-end relationship, I broke out of the dead-end industry I had been working in. Little by little, I moved up from one job to another, and when I finally began earning over $25,000 a year, I felt free. At last I could begin saving, and though at around 30 years old I was late in the investing game, I might be able to build up a little nest egg for my retirement.     

Innocent investments turn sour

I began investing in an index fund through a Spanish company. I opened up a pension plan with my bank. Every month, I confidently set aside 25% of my earnings to go into my emergency fund and my investments. I still only had a few thousand dollars to my name, but I had come a long way from where I was just a few years before, and I was relieved to finally be able to build a secure safety net for myself.           

But it was this year of 2025, when I attended a workshop on investing in Europe, hoping to gain some more insight that could help me in my retirement planning, that my taxation nightmare began. It turns out that I had been doing everything wrong in the eyes of the United States. 

Filing US taxes as a foreign resident is a sort of three-ring torture circus. In the first place, there is no free way to file from abroad, even when we don’t owe taxes. This means that we have to shell out a large chunk of our monthly budget just to tell the IRS that we have already paid taxes on our foreign-earned income in our countries of residence, and we actually don’t owe the US anything. Remember that we are not the robber barons that the US tax code would have you believe; most of us make far below the average US salary, so the mere act of paying to file our taxes already has a substantial impact on our financial solvency.

On top of that, we foreign residents encounter the hostility of one special form after another, under the assumption that we are all seeking to embezzle money from the United States. I’m talking about the PFIC form requirements, and I’m referring to the FBAR filings – both of which, if we do not complete correctly, this year or at any point in the past, can see us facing penalties that amount to quadruple our yearly income.

Costly accounting

This year, I will be paying the equivalent of $6,000 just to have an accountant revise my past filings and make sure that everything is correct. That does not include any taxes that I may have owed on my “foreign” investment funds (which are local for me), or any penalties that I may or may not be slapped with. One-fifth of my yearly income is gone trying to fix the mess in which I have suddenly found myself, and the maximum penalties I could face for unbeknownst “noncompliance” could amount to my full salary for the rest of my working life. Is this what lawmakers were going for when they put these rules into place?

The filing requirements, both when to file and what to file, are confusing. They’re unclear. Doing it yourself will result in potentially catastrophic noncompliance, and finding and paying for a trustworthy professional who is an expert in US expat taxes will set you back hundreds to thousands of dollars a year. In effect, the tax code for Americans abroad as it stands is unduly punitive from start to finish, and the effect it has is to hinder our current prosperity and future security.

I’m not a billionaire residing in the US, trying to hide my money in some offshore account; I’m an American citizen residing in Spain, making below the average salary of this country, and trying my darndest to make sure I don’t come to the end of my life with nothing more than a penny and a prayer. I invest in retirement accounts in Spain instead of the US (or at least I used to) because this is the country where I live. When I’m 70 and trying to withdraw money to pay for something simple like a bingo card or a bus pass, I don’t want to deal with foreign transaction fees, currency conversion rates, or the hassle of accessing funds from what would essentially be a foreign investment account in the U.S.

Not a Bond villain

Most of us who live abroad are normal people, living standard lives, and trying to do the best we can, but the tax code is written to paint us all as trust fund babies or Bond villains trying to hide our wealth in some secret Swiss bank account. I assure you that the vast majority of us earn far less per year than a Bond villain, and the prime reason we have accounts in foreign countries is because we live and work in other countries. Period. We need bank accounts to live, and those of us who have a meager €100 extra at the end of the month need to invest in the countries where we live so that we can try to ensure a better future for ourselves.

The laws regarding PFICs and FBAR requirements are written with such punitive penalties that it seems as though you are trying to catch us failing and kick us while we’re down. I assure you, moving to another country is complicated enough in itself; we don’t need any help from the US government to make it any tougher.  

When I heard President Trump say, “I’m going to end double taxation on our overseas citizens. You’ve been wanting this for years and no one has listened to you. And you deserve it. And I’m going to do it. It’s the right thing to do,” I thought, “My friend, for once we agree. That is the right thing to do.” And I have a feeling that you who are reading this now, both from the right and from the left, are going to come through for us.

Counting on President Trump

Hold on to your hats, because when you end double taxation, the collective sigh of relief that you will hear from Americans around the world is going to send a wave of exhilaration from sea to shining sea of our great country. Americans abroad will know that we are first-class citizens of a first-class nation, a fact that has not been made evident by the current citizenship-based taxation policy that is in place.

Americans abroad come in all shapes, sizes, ages, backgrounds. But what we all want is the possibility of living prosperous, stable lives, supporting the ones we love and spreading the good reputation and goodwill of the United States to our foreign neighbors who make up our communities. Each of us is a tiny ambassador, and when our country treats us as tax criminals and scammers, as it has done for the past decades, it makes us wonder what kind of message we should be sharing about the United States. 

Under the Trump Administration, Congress could put an end to this doubt. Rep. Darin LaHood’s Residence-Based Taxation for Americans Abroad Act, which addresses the needs of the vast majority of Americans abroad, will soon be re-introduced in this Congress, and I, as a Democrat, fully support his effort to make the lives of Americans abroad unimaginably easier. I support anything that Congress and the administration can do to prioritize an urgent solution to this non-political, bipartisan issue affecting millions of Americans abroad.

Let us be full-fledged Americans; don’t treat us like swindlers and crooks. We have chosen to reside abroad for as many reasons as there are grains of sand, but we all feel the pride of being a US citizen, and the tinge of anger at the way we are currently being treated.

Thank you for taking the time to consider the perspective that I and my fellow Americans have shared with you today.

Sincerely,

Samantha Wasek