U.S. double taxation costs a mother and her children their home

“My children and I lost our home. I want you to hear this clearly: that upheaval was entirely avoidable. It happened because I was warned away from owning the place where my own children slept.”

— An American in the United Kingdom

Dear Members of Congress,

I am writing to tell you what American citizenship-based taxation has cost my children and me. Not in dollars. In the roof over our heads.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem. My father is American, my mother was Israeli. I grew up with very strong ties to our family in the United States, so strong that my parents moved us there for a year so that we would feel them for ourselves. I was fourteen. I got a taste of American life, and I loved it, but I have always thought of myself as Israeli.

At twenty-five I emigrated to Europe with my then-husband, who held Israeli citizenship only. We both earned advanced degrees. We had our first child. He became an academic, and because our child has particular needs, I became a stay-at-home mother. We moved twice more to follow his university appointments, adopted a second child, and finally settled in England.

Real estate tax trap

When we bought a home there, we were advised that the safer course was to put it in his name alone. The reason was simple: if the house rose in value, the United States could tax me on that gain, as though our family home were the foreign investment portfolio of a multimillionaire rather than the modest house of a family living on one salary. So that is what we did. I signed away my name on my own home because of a tax law written six thousand kilometres away, for a country I had lived in for one year of my life.

A few years later my husband went through a severe midlife crisis. We divorced. He moved abroad, leaving me in England with our children. Because the house was in his name, I could do nothing to stop him from selling it. My children and I lost our home. I want you to hear this clearly: that upheaval was entirely avoidable. It happened because I was warned away from owning the place where my own children slept.

I have since remarried and I have a wonderful blended family. I wish I could tell you I learned my lesson. But United States tax law, as it stands today, has put me right back in the same impossible position. I am once again a woman who cannot safely put her name on her family's home. I have considered renouncing my American citizenship simply so that I can become a homeowner, which is a devastating thing to weigh, and in any case the process is long and expensive, and there is always something more urgent to spend the money on.

Ordinary people, extraordinary problems

The United States is one of only two countries on earth that taxes its citizens on their worldwide income no matter where they live. Millions of Americans overseas are ordinary people, teachers, carers, parents at home, small business owners, and they are not tax havens. They are families trying to buy a house, save for retirement, and open a bank account.

The Residence-Based Taxation for Americans Abroad Act would end this. It would let Americans who genuinely live abroad be taxed where they live, the way nearly every other nation in the world already does. I am asking you to support it, to co-sponsor it when it is introduced, and to see it through to passage.

Please do not let another family lose its home over a rule that no other country in the world would think to impose.

Respectfully,

A mother in the United Kingdom