By Dako Nobody loses a brokerage account at the border. That’s the fear that brings people to this question, so let’s retire it in the first paragraph: moving to Japan does not freeze, confiscate, or erase your US accounts. What…
By Dako The scariest version of the story goes like this: you give up your green card, and the IRS takes half of everything on your way out. I’ve now spent enough evenings inside section 877A of the tax code…
By Dako & Jay In our house we talk about “our retirement money” the way most couples do. One number, one plan, one future. The IRS has never once seen it that way. A 401(k) is an individual account. Not…
By Jay Nobody warns you about the paperwork. People warn you about chopsticks etiquette and meeting the parents and whether you should bow or shake hands. Useless. Lovely, but useless. I’m the American half of this blog. My wife Dako…
By Dako Our portfolio is boring on purpose. US-listed ETFs, a handful of individual US stocks, and almost nothing else. No NISA. No Japanese funds. That looks strange for a half-Japanese household, and the reason sounds paranoid until I walk…
If you hold a green card and think you might leave the US someday, there’s a phrase you need to meet long before any moving trucks show up: covered expatriate. The covered expatriate rules decide whether giving up a green…
We are a Japanese-American couple living between the US and Japan in the way a lot of cross-border families do: our bodies are in America, and a second life keeps running quietly in the background. One of us grew up…