While April 15 will always stick in my head as “Tax Day”, it’s a little later in France and varies by a week or two depending upon where you live. For us this year it’s May 21 and I’m happy to say that because we didn’t change anything in the last 12 months, the online procedure was even easier than in 2018. We signed into our account with the tax office, Finances Publique, where we found that our information from last year had already been carried over to the forms for the current year. All that we had to do was to confirm our names and address, update the income figures and the dollar/euro exchange rate, put a check mark in the electronic signature box, and we were finished. Done in just a few minutes and we anticipate owing the same amount of income tax as before: zero. Continue reading “Well I declare: income taxes”

Since today, April 15, is traditionally Tax Day in the US, it probably sounds odd for us to say that we were happy to see our French income tax forms arrive last week, but that’s exactly how we feel. Last year was our first time to report our revenue and it turned out to be relatively simple as I wrote about in the blog post You can run, but…. We filled out the paper forms, following a guide in English that we purchased, and deposited them directly into the huge mailbox in front of the Center of Public Finance office just before the mid-May due date. According to the treaty between our 2 countries, generally speaking, you pay tax based on where you earn the money and since our income is all from US pensions, we anticipated that only Uncle Sam would be sending us a bill. Four months later we were pleased to discover that the French government agreed and sent us a letter to confirm that; however, one important piece of information was missing from that document. Continue reading “The taxes are here”