Taxes

Actually after I posted my question I found a lot more information on the "Investment Forum" section relating to taxes. For other newbies, it's probably a good idea to search the forums before posting a question. Anyways, thanks to vpainter and others that continue to answer all questions with patience. Cheers.

chikano,

vpainter said "if". Look up the tax brackets to understand this more. In order for you to pay 35%, you would need to be making more than 379K a year which most expats don't make. Most fall in the 28 or 33% range. Let's say you make 100K, you're paying 28% on the $7100, you're paying $1988 on a 100K salary. That's practically less than 2% on your entire salary. Secondly and equally important, in the US, you're not just paying 28 or 33%, because that's just for FEDERAL taxes alone. Add social security, medicare, state, and city taxes, and people find themselves paying between 40 and 50% to the tax man alone. So basically you just went down from 40-50% to 2%. That's practically double the US salary if you look at it that way. Add the travel money for you and the family, free healthcare, housing, utilities, almost free gas, free schooling, and a million other things, and you find yourself tripling, and more for some people, more or less, your US income/take-home. That works out to be a 1 to 3 kind of equation. For every year you put in, that would be the equivalent of 3 years in the US. I choose to work 10 years than wasting 30, or 15 than 45, life is too short. This is not true for everyone but just to give you a general idea.

I believe Price Waterhouse will charge US $400 to do your taxes, but this will be paid by Aramco and you do not have to pay anything out of your pocket.

If you have "overpaid" taxes for 2012, you will get back a check for the overpayment. Actually I requested it to be directly deposited to my US bank account and IRS did that for 2011 taxes.

We had them file state taxes for us, as well as federal. We had to pay $230 to them for their services regarding state taxes.

We had refunds coming to us from both federal and state, and they were deposited to our US bank account, just like previous years. Everything was filed electronically, and it was expedient once it was sent off by them. There was a lot of waiting beforehand though, even after we'd input all of our data into their cumbersome database.

Not sure how others fare with their communication with PWC, but we had a hard time connecting with anyone at the local office via phone, let alone getting answers on questions as a first year family. Make sure you get a clear understanding of what they're doing for you, and when and in what order, especially regarding extensions. We had an extremely hard time getting them to answer any questions to the spouse. Not an easy situation when the employee doesn't have time or privacy to chase down tax particulars during the day. Just sayin'.