Where do I start if I have been travelling with no fixed address?
Start with the country you left, not the countries you have been in. Residence ends when ties end, so the first piece of work is a dated list of the ties you kept there: a home, family, registrations, coverage, accounts, a licence, a correspondence address. That list tells you whether the original residence ever stopped. Only then is it worth asking whether another country has begun to claim you, because a treaty tie-breaker operates only between two countries that both do. Establish the position, then decide what to file. Doing it the other way round means preparing returns on an assumption.
How do I actually end tax residence in my home country?
By ending the ties, and by being able to show when each of them ended. There is rarely a single act that does it. A departure date on a boarding pass is not the same thing as a residence ending, and a country does not stop treating you as resident because you told it you had left. The practical sequence is to identify the ties that carry weight, deal with them deliberately, keep the dated evidence, and treat the change of residence as the outcome of those facts. Where a new country will be involved, the evidence of arrival is part of the same file.
Does leaving the country and travelling change my residence straight away?
Usually not. Departure starts the question, it does not answer it. Without a new residence the old one persists, which is why continuous travel so often produces the worst of both systems rather than neither: a live claim from the country you left, no second country to invoke a treaty against, and relief with nothing to attach to. The date your residence changed is a conclusion drawn from facts about ties, not from the day you flew. So the first task is to find out whether it has changed at all, and if it has, when.
Should I establish residence in another country before I start travelling?
It is worth deciding deliberately rather than by default. Without a new residence the old one persists, so a plan built on being resident in no country generally leaves you resident where you started, with no treaty to call on. Establishing a genuine residence in one country gives the old claim something to yield to, and makes a tie-breaker capable of operating if both countries claim you. That is a real decision with real consequences for what you file and where, and it is much easier to make before the travelling starts than to reconstruct once several years have passed.
What is the first document I need to sort out my residence position?
There is no single document, which is rather the point. Residence is decided on facts, so the file is built from dated evidence of ties beginning and ending: the sale or letting of a home, the closing or opening of registrations and coverage, the movement of dependants, and a reliable record of where you physically were. Start assembling that while the events are current. Reconstructing it years afterwards is possible, and it is what much of this work consists of, but the position is always weaker than one supported by documents kept at the time.
Why do people who live nowhere often end up taxed the most?
Because the relief they are counting on needs two claims and they have only one. Treaty tie-breakers operate between two countries that both treat you as resident. The continuous traveller keeps his original residence, never establishes a second, and so holds a single unrelieved claim while believing he holds none. Meanwhile the country he left has heard nothing from him. The outcome is a live residence, full domestic taxation, unfiled returns and no treaty to invoke. The fix is unglamorous: establish where you are resident, evidence it, and file on that footing.
What happens if two countries both say I am resident?
The treaty tie-breaker resolves it to one residence, applied in order: where your permanent home is, then your centre of vital interests, then your habitual abode, then nationality, with a competent-authority referral if all of those fail. It is an evidence exercise rather than an election — you document the home and the life around it. Getting a single residence settled is what makes every other position in both returns consistent. See the residency tie-breaker.
How do I file US taxes when I am married to a foreign spouse?
Three routes. File separately, listing your spouse as a non-resident alien — which needs either an identification number for them or the accepted notation where none exists. Elect to treat them as a resident and file jointly, gaining the joint brackets and accepting their worldwide income. Or file as head of household if you have a qualifying dependant, which some Americans abroad can do while married. The right answer turns on their income and their assets. See a US person with a non-resident spouse.
