How to file US tax for green card holders

[newliweds 0]

Hello guys, I moved down to California last year and before the end of the year I found a job and have been working there since.

Recently I just received my W-2s (Canadian equivalent of T4), question is, which US tax form should I file, and will these forms sent to my residency address by the US government (in Canada we receive the forms in the mail) ?

also, I have some savings in Canada, a little over 10k, half of which is the RRSP (retirement fund), do I need to declare that and pay tax for it ?

Any suggestions, advices will be appreciated.

[warlord 72]

Hello guys, I moved down to California last year and before the end of the year I found a job and have been working there since.

Recently I just received my W-2s (Canadian equivalent of T4), question is, which US tax form should I file, and will these forms sent to my residency address by the US government (in Canada we receive the forms in the mail) ?

also, I have some savings in Canada, a little over 10k, half of which is the RRSP (retirement fund), do I need to declare that and pay tax for it ?

Any suggestions, advices will be appreciated.

You will have to fill out a Form 90221 (FBAR) for all foreign investments and accounts. You can put all of them on this form, including your RRSP. This gets sent into the US Treasury. Remember though, they do not want the yearly total for the account. They will want the highest amount that account was worth out of the quarterly statements.

As for your taxes, you can't do the 1040ez form with having a foreign investment, so most likely (unless you have special instances) you would probably use form 1040. There you would fill it out as normal. I don't think you would need to file for a form 8891 because you are not a US citizen at this point and only a GC holder. You may want to double check. If so, it's like the FBAR where you would use a separate 8891 for all your foreign investment accounts.

Hope that helps, I'm going through back tracking for the past 5 years because I did not do this previously and filed the 1040ez forms every year. So I'm learning quite bit about it. However, in my previous thread it was posted that http://forums.serbinski.com/index.php is (and actually is) a great forum to ask for information and read about others...

[Udella&Wiz 325]

Head over to the Canadian forum we always have a tax thread and you can search back in the old ones.

One of the best sites to go to where you can ask questions for free to an expert on US/Cdn tax scenarios is here (also noted by Warlord above :0 ) : http://forums.serbinski.com/

[Flames9_RN 358]

Just make sure you search first, Agnelson can get pretty rude at times,lol

[zyggy 9]

You will have to fill out a Form 90221 (FBAR) for all foreign investments and accounts. You can put all of them on this form, including your RRSP. This gets sent into the US Treasury. Remember though, they do not want the yearly total for the account. They will want the highest amount that account was worth out of the quarterly statements.

As for your taxes, you can't do the 1040ez form with having a foreign investment, so most likely (unless you have special instances) you would probably use form 1040. There you would fill it out as normal. I don't think you would need to file for a form 8891 because you are not a US citizen at this point and only a GC holder. You may want to double check. If so, it's like the FBAR where you would use a separate 8891 for all your foreign investment accounts.

Hope that helps, I'm going through back tracking for the past 5 years because I did not do this previously and filed the 1040ez forms every year. So I'm learning quite bit about it. However, in my previous thread it was posted that http://forums.serbinski.com/index.php is (and actually is) a great forum to ask for information and read about others...

Form 8891 is required for all US Persons. Citizens and Permanent Residents are both considered US Persons.