How to Think About Tax When You Work Across Borders
Not tax advice: residency tests, a paper trail, and a professional who can see the whole year.
[ journal ]
Someone with a form will eventually ask where you actually lived. I want a residency test I can explain, a calendar of days, and a folder that exists. I am not a tax adviser. Nothing here is advice for your situation. It is the posture I use so I do not invent a story a revenue office will later unwind.
Residency is the word people skip. Days in a country can matter. Ties can matter: housing, family, where the work is directed, where the bank account lives. The United States has its own gravity for citizens and green-card holders even when the body is in Aotearoa. New Zealand has tests of its own. Other places add presence rules you only discover after a long stay felt “temporary” in your head. Temporary is not a legal category just because you packed light.
I keep records like a person who expects to be asked. Entry stamps and boarding passes if I still have them. Lease dates. Invoices. A simple log of where I slept, even when it feels obsessive. The log is cheaper than reconstructing a year from email receipts in April. I do not need a perfect system. I need dates I can defend.
Professionals exist because this stacks. A US person working remotely toward Tāmaki Makaurau is not a blog template. Treaties, filing calendars, and “did this visa let me work” are facts with consequences. I would rather pay someone who does this for a living than crowdsource a strategy from a forum thread that ended in 2019.
This is separate from daily burn and from the builder-budget question of whether you are cheap in ways that wreck sleep. Tax is the annual layer. Mixing them is how people “save” on an accountant and then spend a winter untangling estimated payments.
If you work across borders, assume the interesting question is not “do I feel like a resident.” The interesting question is what the rules count. Write the days down. Keep the papers. Hire help before the year closes, not after the letter arrives.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.