Wow pretty eye opening stuff. If this is what happens in Nigeria I’d hate to hear stories about Sudan, etc.
Yes, but it doesn’t kick in until you’ve been overseas for nearly a year. So if you show up on January 1, 2008 you’ll be tax-free for that year when you file in 2009. If you show up in June, 2008, you won’t be able to claim the tax-free status until 2010. Also, if you return to the US during that period for more than (I think) 35 days, your exemption disappears.
You have to file, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to pay anything.
An acquaintance of mine spent a year in Abuja as part of a work-related project. She is single, and took her two dogs with her. She lived in a house that was provided to her by the organization she was employed by. I know she really liked the people she met there and enjoyed it for the most part, but her employer, who maintains a presence there, took some safety precautions that the OP might not get.
I should also mention that not all money earned overseas is tax-exempt. If you work for the US Government, for example, you are NOT exempt. You must file a return, in any circumstance, and you have to include the appropriate exempt-status form.
I visited Nigeria in 1992, for a conference. I arrived in Lagos, then went to the conference in Enugu. Afterward we took a trip to Old Calabar. Although my info is old, I doubt things have changed all that much.
I arrived a day after most of the other conference participants. I was met as I got off the plane by a “minder” sent to pick me up by the conference organizers. He whisked me off to the International Visitors lounge. He would reappear every 20 minutes or so to ask me for $5 or $10 bucks so he could make some arrangement. I finally breezed through immigration and customs with the officials scarcely looking at my documents or baggage. Outside, my minder spent about 15 minutes haggling with a taxi driver to take me to a hotel. I figured he was trying to get me a good rate. After I got there, I found out the driver had actually charged me ten times the normal fare.
The next day my minder never showed up at the hotel to take me to the airport for the flight to Enugu. Not wanting to miss the conference, I went there myself. I ended up paying more in “tips” and bribes than I did for the plane ticket, but I got there.
From what I saw of Lagos (where I stayed again at the end of my trip), it was pretty depressing. Run down, crowed, chaotic, and squalid. No doubt there are some attractive areas, but I never saw them.
I have visited and worked in many countries in Africa: Gabon, Kenya, South Africa, Madagascar, Cameroon, Zaire. Nigeria was decidedly the least pleasant, by a long shot. Based on what I saw, I would not recommend it, especially if you had to live in or near Lagos.
Just remember, if you’re stuck in Nigeria and a relative dies, leaving you a lot of money that you just can’t access yourself, drop us all an email.
I used to work with someone who travelled every few months on business. He knew someone who owned a compound of some sort. A Mercedes was there to drive him out through the gates, straight into starving crowds. Someone there at the same exhibition was unlucky enough not to know how things worked and got beaten by the “police” who demanded bribes when they stopped her car.
I’m sure its alright if you know the right people though 
That is correct. You do, however, still have to file if you make above … I think it’s only US$5000 a year. Something ridiculously low. I guess they want a guarantee that you do not have to pay anything. I’ve known plenty of Americans who blow that off, though, if they didn’t actually have to pay anything, and nothing untoward happened to them, even after they returned to the US.
But in that case you can still ultimately get tax exempt for the second half of 2008–you just have you pay your estimated taxes in 2009 along with an extension to file, and then at the end of 2009, you file your 2008 taxes along with your claim that you have lived abroad for 1 calendar year and the time in 2008 was part of that residence. We did this when we first moved to Lebanon in 2008.
Also, there are a couple of tests to qualify for exemption. One is the one where you spend less than 30 or 35 days (whatever it is) in the States per year. The other (which we used) was the ‘bona fide residence test’, which doesn’t have any hard and fast rules about how many days per year you can spend in the US–you just have to show that the foreign residence is your bona fide place of residence.
My brother lived a year in the Central African Republic in 2002. Like your husband, he was a pilot still wanting to collect fly hours, so he signed up with the Flying Doctors, who were based at a Catholic Mission.
He looks back at his year there fondly, but also with a lot of cynism about Africa.
Some points he made, thay may apply to Nigeria as well:
The local people are incredible friendly, cheerful and outgoing, but you have to keep your distance because they always want something from you. They are not faking it, in that they only like you for your money, but if you strike up any kind of friendship, they will expect you to pay through the nose. That’s what they would expect their own rich friends and relatives to do as well.
That was one of the reasons that my brother, who was single at the time, avoided the many offers from African women. With most of them, their intentions were very made very clear: “We flirt, we have sex, I have a baby, you get to have sired a kid and pay for it. Deal?”
You gotta have staff. There is no supermarkt or convenience store catering to working people. My brother lived in a more rural part of the country, about fifty miles from the capital. Preparing dinner, over there, started by catching one of the chickens roaming the yard, and killing, plucking and preparing it. You can’t combine that with a full-time job. So you have to have a cook, and staff. The only convienience food my brother had access too were the ripe mangoes from the trees around the mission. But those were yummy.
Voodoo and withcraft is everyday business there. Many people treat the god of Christianity as a competing god. A god with better medicines, but less powerful threats, so he is less useful for either cursing someone or deflecting a curse.
The people are incredibly tough. My brother would transport an African nurse in the plane with a broken arm. She had no sedation, her arm must have hurt like hell, yet she didn’t give a peep. Kids died from disease and everybody just moved on.
One of the reasons a lot of transport was done by plane, was that a car on the road ran a high risk of being robbed. My brother’s plane couldn’t fly too low for the same reason, and not near roads.
My brothers stay ended with the revolution of 2002. The people at the mission feared for life and limb, and my brother had a big adventure in trying to get out of the country safe and sound.
My dad, and developement worker, has stayed with rural people, mainly craftsmen, in Africa many times, demonstrating, sharing and developing his designs for sanitary equipment, irrigation etc. Mainly in Ghana. He has the fondest feelings for Africa and Africans. What he likes best is the general cheerfulness, and warmth of the people. They live in the now, have relatively few worries, and they have a lot of time to play, talk, dance and make fun with each other. Gotta love a place where everybody gathers in the morning to sit in the shade of the trees and talk about what they dreamt that night…
Hmmmmm…
I have to say, after reading this and other stuff, we’re taking Nigeria off of the list of potential places to move. Thank you all for your insights, I knew that there would be lots of folks here with info.
I love this place - is there anything that hasn’t been experienced by someone here?
I live in beautiful Cameroon, just a few short kilometers from the Nigerian border.
I gotta stand up for Africa. Now, Cameroon is no Nigeria. And rural Cameroon is especially no Lagos. I’d be scared of out of my mind to go to Lagos. Frankly, I get a little sketched out when visiting the local Nigerian market town (despite what everyone here says, Nigeria has the best manufactured goods around, and we all go to trading towns near the borders to get our DVD players, blenders, fancy cookies, cheap soda, etc.).
However, I’m not really living the ex-pat life. I get around on bush taxis, do my own bargain marketing in the local language and eat local food with my hands while sitting on mats for dinner. Ex-pat life is something else- landcruisers, compounds, cooks, drivers, American schools, imported food supermarkets, etc. Ex-pat life is pretty insular. You wouldn’t be wandering the streets of Lagos by yourself too much. Mostly your driver would take you from your compound to the fancy ex-pat restaurant and back and you’d rarely step foot in anything seedy. I’ve always imagined it’d be pretty boring, myself. But then again, there are plenty of ex-pats and ex-pat’s spouses who do some very good social work and get to actually interact with the culture they live in.
Before everyone reading this thinks that all of Africa is an absolute hellhole, let me post some of my experiences:
As a woman living alone, I have never even once in my year and a half here felt at risk of being raped. The men are amorous and persistant- I get at least two or three knocking on my door every night wanting to flirt- but not violent.
Although I’m by far the richest person in my neighborhood (which isn’t saying much, I make about the same as a local high school teacher) I have experienced only one incident of petty theft from neighborhood kids. I take the same reasonable precautions most of us would take in the states (don’t walk alone at night in big cities, etc.) and I feel about as safe as I did in America.
Even local hospitals have been clean and efficient. Although it’s not the gleaming halls that we are used to, I feel comfortable going there for routine problems. In bigger cities, there are more advanced hospitals as well as reputable eye doctors, dentists, etc. It’s basic, but no barbaric. I have been sick plenty, but not to the point that it outweighs the joy I get living here.
My local market has a fairly good supply of produce. Manufactured goods can only be bought in larger cities for fairly high prices, but the stuff is there. In the capital you can find anything you want, including fresh sushi flown in on Air France. Sure, little things like Doritos and cheese become precious like gold. But that’s part of the adventure.
Anyway, I’m having a great time here, and while it’s not for everyone, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
I met a Nigerian man the other day, I asked him what he missed about Nigeria. He said, “only the weather.”
As a follow-up to even sven’s post, I would also comment that much of the rest of Africa would not be a problem. In my experience, Cameroon, Gabon, Madagascar, and parts of South Africa would all be OK. (Until recently, I would have included Kenya as well.) You wouldn’t have some of the amenities you were used to in the US, and some things might be pretty disorganized, but life would otherwise be pretty pleasant.
Nigeria, especially Lagos, in my book are a different story. Congo-Kinshasha/Zaire would probably be pretty dicey as well.
:eek: :eek: This would about do it for me.
A few years ago, a wealthy Singaporean fell victim to the Nigerian letter/e-mail scam. He became increasingly frustrated about the lack of a return even though he had poured so much money into it, and so when the Nigerians told him “Look, here’s a plane ticket, come over here and see for yourself that everything’s going okay,” he took them up on it. Immediately upon arrival, they kidnapped him, grabbed him right there at the airport, and held him for ransom. I thought that showed a certain flair and ingenuity on the part of the Nigerians.
My respect for travel warnings diminished a whole lot when one was issued against traveling to the Netherlands in 2003. The warning was connected to some Dutch mass demonstrations agains the war in Iraq. An American friend of mine had planned to visit me, and he asked me about the validity of the warning.
I could tell him that:
-Holland was officially an political ally of the US at that point;
-The USA had seen far, far more mass outrage against the Iraq-war then the Netherlands, at that point;
-That the worst thing that could happen was that he would be delayed in traffic if another mass demonstration would take place if he was here;
-That he was far more likely to be asked sympathetically if he had any relatives in the army to worry about, then he would have been to be subject to anti-American rants.
So, such travel warnings are a bit like a legal disclaimer; they are meant to avoid lawsuits, and shouldn’t be taken as an estimate of real dangers.