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Ask HN: Does legal tax evasion work for regular people?

8 points o1o1o1 | 3 comments | 15 Mar 25 06:16 UTC | HN request time: 1.34s | source

Hello fellow HN readers,

For some time now I've been researching how to become a digital nomad and legally optimise my taxes.

There are numerous services that claim to be able to help with this, here are just two examples that I found:

https://taxhackers.io

https://denationalize.me

Does anyone have any experience of this and can tell me if it really works and is legal?

Also, why do they charge so much when there are other services that can do this for much less (e.g. Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas)?

I am thinking of moving to Thailand, but I do not want to be a perpetual traveller. Can setting up a US LLC as a non-resident (or a UAE free zone company) be considered "foreign sourced income" without being taxed even if I am a tax resident of Thailand (>180 days living there) and what experience can you possibly share if you have tried something like this before?

What additional advice can you give me and others to make this a great trip instead of a nightmare?

Thanks for all your input and a healthy discussion on this topic!

1. scarface_74 ◴[15 Mar 25 22:45 UTC] No.43375643[source]▶
I just read the citations you posted. Do you make enough for it to be worth it?

From one of the citations

> The average digital nomad pays $64.76 per day in taxes they do not have to pay - that is over $23.000 per year. Imagine what you could do with all this money. Let us do the paperwork, while you travel the world*

$23K isn’t nothing. But I saved half that much just by moving from a relative low tax cost state (GA) to a state tax free state (FL).

If I lived in a state with higher state taxes and higher cost of living, I would have saved even more.

And anything you do, the first step is giving up your US citizenship since the US taxes worldwide income.

But then you need to have citizenship somewhere else or become “stateless”. From the few countries I looked at, it’s a 3-5 year process.

The US has a relatively strong passport (ranked 9th in the world). You would also have to give that up.

Cypress and Paraguay have strong passports (brought up in your second site).

Edit:

I see you aren’t a US resident. None of what I said applies to you. I’ll keep it up anyway for anyone else thinking about something similar.

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2. o1o1o1 ◴[16 Mar 25 06:04 UTC] No.43377180[source]▶
Answer to your first question: yes, even if it means paying such companies and, if necessary, additional tax lawyers, as income is taxed rather brutally in my home country.

Thanks for your input though, this is a valid concern and important to consider: amount of potential tax saved and citizenship.

Advice to all US citizens considering this: take a look at the power of passports, it can go a long way. Here is one of many sources to check: https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php

3. yellow_lead ◴[16 Mar 25 16:19 UTC] No.43380160[source]▶
> And anything you do, the first step is giving up your US citizenship since the US taxes worldwide income.

But the foreign earned income credit can reduce your tax liability by up to around 100k in some cases.