I’m a Canadian, living in Canada but my income ($10,000 per month) comes from overseas.
If I were to buy a house in Florida and move there, how much of my $10,000 a month would I be allowed to keep? I work from my PC as a software consultant.
Keep in mind I would be competely legit, totally honest and above board, no cheating.
Thanks
Gus
I am not an expert on this but I know enough to request some more details. Do you want to live in the U.S. full time or just part-time. How much of the year if it is the latter? Do you want to you want to pursue a path to citizenship? There are plenty of Canadian tech consultants who do work in the U.S. I don’t think they all pay U.S. taxes if they only live here part of the time and their companies are still based in Canada but I may be wrong about that.
It would also depend on whether you’re married and filing jointly. If you bought a house in FL, the interest on the mortgage would be deductible as would any FL income tax, though of course you’d have to pay that too, I believe.
But the basics can be calculated on this page.
Note that the figure you enter is taxable income. That’s your income after deductions, like mortgage, state tax, personal exemption, charitable deductions, and a few other things which are generally smaller.
If you were considered a permanent resident, I believe you’d be taxed like a US citizen. I would think the maximum federal income tax you’d pay would be on 1210,000 - 11,600 (standard deduction for married) =108,400 which is 23,969 if you are single and $19,350 if you’re married filing jointly (and your spouse has no income). The FICA (Social Security) tax would be $6,621.60 (it maxes out around $106,000 in income) and (I think) Medicare tax would be 0.062120,000 = $7440. So total Federal tax would be no more than about $38,130, and would be less if you filed jointly or had deductions.
Florida has no individual income taxes, so there’s that.
That depends.
looks like your gross income would be $120,00. From this you subtract your execptions for family members and either your Standard deduction or Itemized deductions. This would give your your taxable income.
An example out of $85,000 your tax would be around $13,500. If your taxable is above $85K firure a tax rate of at lease 28%.
From the $13000+ subtract any foriegn taxes.
Now also add Fl taxes.
Don’t forget the impact of paying privately for health insurance, which is paid out of your public taxes as a Canadian. ISTR it works out to be about the same cost overall, just less bureaucracy on the Canadian side.
As a Canadian living in the states at about your income level (albeit in NM, not FLA, single filing separately, no kids, no house), IIRC last tax return I paid something like 20-25k total, with something like that 19k of that federal. If you’re buying a house, the interest is tax deductible which can shave off quite a bit, especially if the bank owns 90+% of your house, because then your payment is almost all interest.
If you don’t have a company providing you with health insurance, though, that will be a significant expense. Private insurance in the states is expensive, and so critically dependent on health conditions and age that I wouldn’t care to estimate.
Florida state sales tax is six percent (food and medicine are exempt). But some counties have additional sales tax. There’s also a 34.4 cents per gallon tax on gas and a 33.9 cents tax on a pack of cigarettes. I believe these are lower than the average Canadian equivalents.
Thanks everyone,
I would like to live there year round and not persue citizenship.
Well that’s not entirely true, if I could get it, I would in an instant but everything I’ve read seems to indicate it is very difficult to do so.
My wife will have a pension of approx 30k a year, and there’s just the 2 of us.
So 120k for me, 30 for her for a total of 150,000 income.
I’m 45 and she is 51 and both in good health.
We both love FLorida and would like to live somewhere sunny and warm and driving distance to cruise ships and attractions.
Looking at real estate it seems a person can get a very nice house down there for 200k, which also makes it quite attractive as we could sell ours for 400 tomorrow.
Thanks for your help
Gus
Sales tax here is around 6-7%, depending on the locality. It’s also currently deductible from your federal taxes.
Nice houses around the Tampa Bay area can be had in the $200-300k range, depending on your definition of nice, and exact location. Proximity to large cities makes this vary a lot. Proximity to the water/beaches tends to make housing prices go up exponentially (Derek Jeter’s house in Tampa is well into 8 figures). Assuming you don’t have to worry about schools, you can live near a big decent sized city but not on the water for that amount.
I am not Canadian, but in the same approximate bracket and situation as you are, and live near Tampa. My taxes are probably about in the range that Leahcim indicates, although I don’t know the exact amount off the top of my head and wouldn’t post it here if I knew it. I work as a consultant and sometimes work overseas for large stretches of time and other times work out of state. This fact doesn’t impact my taxes much since I get paid here. My largest tax outays are federal taxes and then employment taxes such as social security, then property taxes. My largest deductions are mortgage expenses and property taxes.
Just as an aside this site lets you broadly compare different countries to each other. It says that if a Canadian moves to the US they would on average make 21% more money, but work 4% more hours a year, have 9% more chance of being unemployed, spend 83% more on healthcare and die 3 years sooner…
My wife and I are both dual citizens living in Canada for 43 years and retired. We have looked into this. We would save a lot in taxes, probably $15,000 a year on combined incomes of about $130K but neither of us accumulated enough SS credits before moving here to be eligible for Medicare. Now do I hold out much hope that Obamacare, for all its deficiencies will ever actually be implemented. Congress is exceedingly unlikely to appropriate money to cover its costs. So we will continue to shiver in the dark.
Congress already appropriated enough money - as part of the bill itself - not only to cover the bill’s costs, but to raise over $100bn extra over the next ten years, and even more beyond that. The costs are more than covered. But I take your point that health care is one of the real problems with moving to the US, and the main ‘Obamacare’ provisions don’t kick in until 2014 - the reason for that is to ensure the costs are covered right from the start, incidentally - so it’s no real use to prospective migrants for now. But without wishing to spark a political tangent, this is one of the problems that show why some sort of health care reform providing the solutions Obamacare provides was so necessary: the US is a hugely attractive country in a lot of ways, both for citizens and for immigrants, but its health care system still retains the possibility of leaving people literally destitute if they’re extremely unlucky with their employment and health situations. I know a fair number of people from developed countries like Canada and in Europe who would like to move to the US but consider health care one of the main factors in choosing not to.
No it doesn’t kick in until 2014 so they could hide the costs and make it look revenue neutral for a certain window of time that the CBO used to score the costs. It isn’t. It is a massive money loser. They had to jigger it to show 10 years of tax collections to 6 years of outlays to balance the inflows and outflows for the intial ten year period which is all that is looked at for CBO purposes. And that is assuming they are going to cut several hundred billion or a trillion dollars from medicare as part of the magic they included in the plan to make the numbers “work.” This is supposed to occur when doctors are already refusing patients on medicare because the reimbursements do not reflect their actual costs. Basically it is a new, gargantuan entitlement added on top of our other entitlements that we already have no way to pay for… thus $1.5 trillion and climbing in yearly deficits.
In short the thing was designed to fail and move us to a single payer system. Whether that is a bug or feature is something people will decide for themselves. I just know that we recently fired 17 people to get ready for it and most of the small business guys I know are getting out while they still can. A lot of their companies will be essentially worthless if this goes through so they are unloading their assets and trying to sell out for pennies on the dollar to people who are willing to risk betting Obamacare will be repealed or declared unconstitutional. A lot of businesses that have been in families for generations are going to go away and never come back because the numbers no longer work.
Which brings up something no one has mentioned which is that the OP will have to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes and since he is self-employed those will add up to roughly another 15% on top of what has already been mentioned in this thread because he will pay both the employer and employee portions. Given the demographics in the US that percentage will either go up substantially or the benefits will be cut drastically so he had better plan for those eventualities. I am not sure what the law is in FL but he may also have to pay an unemployment tax and provide workers compensation even if he is the only employee. Unemployment taxes will likely go up as well now that we have chosen a path that leads to higher, long term structural unemployment.
In short, if you have an income of $120k don’t come to the US. There are much better and freer places to live now where you can keep more of what you earn and have less red tape to fool with. If you have no skills and no income then it literally pays to come here since with the earned income credit the government will pay you come tax time instead of you paying them. The US is just not very welcoming to skilled immigrants right now and it has nothing to do with the lack of nationalized health care since someone with your income could get an insurance plan like mine for $100-$200 a month… but that was before Obamacare. People trying to get that exact same plan now will pay much, much more if they can get it at all since some types of plans have been outlawed entirely. We were lucky to be grandfathered in.
Good luck to you.
Like I said I don’t want to divert the thread into a long political tangent. But I’d just note the health care bill doesn’t ‘jigger’ the costs: it saves $100bn in the first decade, $1 trillion in the second decade, and keeps saving beyond that. It isn’t a money loser. The only way it could lose money is if huge elements of the cost savings get repealed. (Those cost savings do not include the potential future cuts to Medicare you mentioned, because the CBO refused to score those).
Back on topic though - vaguely - the problem with those low-price, high-deductible $200 plans that ‘Obamacare’ makes illegal is that they don’t cover for you for much if the worst happens. If you or your child get cancer and have to pay tens of thousands a year for treatment, which is a real possibility for high-skilled, middle aged migrant families, those plans won’t help you much. It’s a real worry for a lot of people I know, and one of the main reasons they choose not to move to the US.