Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

[johntpartee]

Social Security Administration
Office of Public Inquiries
Windsor Park Building
6401 Security Blvd.
Baltimore, MD 21235

SSA also provides a service whereby they will automatically send you a yearly update of the credits you have.

[travelNteach]

@ professor gringo: i thought the in order to be eligible for tax exempt status, one had to be living/working abroad 300/or 330+ days in the tax year. with your system, wouldnt you have to pay taxes on all monies earned overseas for both of those years?

@ naturegirl, payments made to IRS are completely independent of monies owed to SS and state/local taxes.

@ zero: i couldnt open the link you provided. i have never heard that taxes had to be paid on privates. i thought it was just a residency law that determined whether one had to pay taxes or not. additionally, if these monies are viewed as self-employment, then my "company" would be a foreign based company and not taxable in the US but in the country i live in.

i dont hold much hope for SS either. my mother and grandmother can no longer live on ss alone, where as before they could. and my grandmother owns her house ourtight. but when making other investments, there is a capital gains tax to be paid on earned income. the stock market has pretty much recovered, so unless people cashed out, there losses were only temporary and on paper only. if they were getting payouts instead of having the dividends re-inevested, they did take a hit for a while.

also, someone posted that interest earned on bank accounts and the like wasnt taxed as personal income. i always thought that is was because i used to get a w2 or w4 (some number) income statement from my bank. there is also a line on the 1040 EZ and 1040A forms to report interest as earned income. if this interest is indeed counted as income, would i be right to assume that it counts towards my 90K exemption, where as the capital gains on stocks wouldnt be exempt?

my last statement from SS said that i will get $255/month when i retire. happy happy joy joy. i cant buy property in the country i live in. so i just save as much as i can. i get 7% interest on my us dollar cd's. that is my retirement fund.

[Zero]

[naturegirl321]

[veiledsentiments]

Naturegirl... if you have declared income on your Schedule C, you paid the social security with the tax return. That is the *only* way that you can pay in. There are no voluntary payments allowed.

Social security has a pretty decent website and you can order the report of your earnings. It will not report "credits" but it will tell you what years you had income and how much - and whether you are vested with the 40 quarters (credits). It will also tell you your approximate monthly check at 62, 66, or 70 years of age at retirement.

I always suggest that people get this report and check all the entries. I found that for 3 years, 2 in the 1970s and 1 in the 1980s, a large portion of my income was not included. Fortunately I had all of my tax returns back to prehistoric times, so was able to correct them. It takes one to two years for them to make these corrections.

VS

[naturegirl321]

[naturegirl321]

Slight problem, either the SSA website is blocked in Korea or busy, I can't load the page

[veiledsentiments]

Is this the address that you tried?

http://www.ssa.gov/

It is strange that it would be blocked. Can you get into irs.gov?

VS

[naturegirl321]

[laylow]

One thing I know for a fact is if your sole income is outside of the states and you have not established a Roth account, it doesn't matter how much money you have in your U.S. bank account or under your mattress for that matter. To start such an account, you must be able to provide a W2 form from the previous tax year showing a certain amount of earnings (I am unaware of what that minimum requirement is).

However I am not sure if once you do open one up whether you have to continue to show such documentation or whether it is just show it once to set it up and then throw whatever you want in there regardless of where it came from.

But the former, I am positive of, as I returned to the states for a couple months, got an ordinary part-time job mainly to keep busy until I headed back to the Middle East and then when I received the W2 and emailed it to my investor for American fFunds, I was informed I had not earned enough income to start a ROTH (and also told that the income must be from the states). Let me note that I had already had an investment account with over $25,000. And I could not convert it to a Roth because my income earned WITHIN the states for the previous year was not enough. So it appears you could earn millions yearly, but if is not a US company or on US soil you can't open a ROTH or even convert to one!

[JordanX]

At first, I was just idly considering moving to Israel. Now I definitely am.

[elamericano]

TEFLers, and really anyone working overseas on a work visa for a foreign employer, can be considered self-employed because they are usually on time-limited work contracts because of how work visas operate. Therefore they can declare this status and pay the self-employment tax for their FICA contributions.

[naturegirl321]

[naturegirl321]