Podcast 314: How do digital nomads pay their taxes?
Many tech companies are shifting to make remote work the norm. Employees get a lot of freedom, but there are a few wrinkles to consider.
Ben Popper
Director of Content
Almost all software developers are being asked to work fully remote, and many companies are moving to keep this arrangement permanent. This raises a lot of new questions around taxes, legal liabilities, and compensation.
Episode Notes
A nice story on how to avoid the Nomad Tax Trap.
Got a lot of employees moving to Texas? The state is notorious for the number of patent lawsuits filed there, and having employees living in the area may expose companies to great legal liability.
If the work from home boom is here to stay, get ready for a lot of “cost-of-living” adjustments to follow.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to kd12 for explaining: How to get an element by its data-id in jQuery
Tags: the stack overflow podcast
12 Comments
It would be great to have an episode on Global digital nomads and taxes instead of the US only.
I thought this too. Hardly a Nomad just moving to a different state.
Totally. This seems aimed pretty squarely at a domestic US audience who move around a bit, not ‘nomads’ in the sense that I understand that word
Not listened yet, but good subject. Historically, societies want nomads to settle just for making them pay taxes.
> How do digital nomads pay their taxes?
Gave me a good laugh. The creatives who have the opportunity and use it to travel around the world working here and there and from somewhere remote — why do they need to care about taxes in the first place? It is a problem invented and introduced by the mooching looters who want to get their “share” by pointing a gun at you. So why the heck do I have to care? How is that my issue?
If they want to kill or punish me for not paying taxes, well so be it. They will not get any more taxes from me then either, that’s for sure but you can’t call them murderer because they have the law on their side so their punishment is legal. Fuck them all. They need us,. but we certainly don’t need them.
Agree !!!!
They change their address listed with their employer to their mothers house in CT and then lie on visa applications or jump between countries every 3-6 months.
you always need at least one person who is “paying for Netflix”
That taxes are complicated for digital nomads moving between various states of the USA, or between various nations of this planet, was already clear to me.
I would have liked to have heard something about what is to be expected/to be done. I heard nothing.
I have used Node-red, it is truly awesome.
As an accountant from Argentina it weird me out to hear that each state has its own income tax in USA. Here the biggest taxes are national, so you pay the same rate no matter where you work from (this covers income tax, VAT and social security mainly). Then the national state has to co participate those taxes among provinces, but that’s no longer your problem.
The closest thing we have is the revenue tax that the provinces apply. When you have to pay revenue tax on more than 1 province there’s a national system to declare and pay your tax. You declare the sum of your revenue and then divide it among the provinces according to a yearly calculated rate. Then each province applies their tax rate over that part of your revenue that you assigned to them.
The rate is calculated half by your income and half by your expenses. So if your expenses are in one province but the value you generated is going to be used in another province, your revenue gets split equally among those 2 provinces. If you move all over the country, generating expenses in every province, each province will get a tiny portion of your revenue to tax on. Except the province where your client uses your value which will get half of your revenue to tax.
Very simple solution to taxes – drop the income tax model all together. Do not tax income, let people have ALL the money they earn. But how will the government get money? Tax all the stuff, tax the resources like gasoline and electricity. The more money you have, the more stuff you buy, the more taxes you pay.
If I am in State A, I pay taxes to State A because I am driving on their roads, or using their services. When I roam over to PROVINCE C, same thing, I am using Province C’s services and infrastructure so I pay taxes for Province C.