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Start here1

The Three That Matter This Year A hundred tools and almost none of them are yours this year. Ten questions — none of them asking for an amount — and this puts the handful that are in the order the deadlines actually fall. /tools/readiness

Money & tax32

Resident Account Conversion Alarm Left India years ago? Your ordinary savings account was supposed to change status the day you left. Check what is overdue — in your browser, nothing sent anywhere. /tools/nro FBAR / FATCA Alarm Two US filings, two dollar thresholds, and they do not always agree. Enter your account values once and see which one your year actually crosses — checked against the IRS and FinCEN directly. /tools/fbar PFIC Detector An Indian mutual fund is very likely a US tax landmine most people have never heard the name of. What the filing exception is, what the election deadline was, and why the "safe" election often is not available at all. /tools/pfic Am I a US Tax Resident? Every foreign-account filing starts with "a US person" — and that is a tax question, not an immigration one. The weighted three-year day count, plus the student and teacher exemptions that stop the clock and the year they quietly run out. /tools/spt Foreign Gift Alarm Your parents wire the down payment. It is not income and never was — but past a threshold it becomes a filing, with a penalty measured against the gift rather than any tax. Where the two lines sit, and which one moves every year. /tools/gift Am I Still a Non-Resident in India? India decides this on its own arithmetic — nothing to do with your visa or what your bank calls your account. Long annual visits can make you resident on far less than six months, and a zero-tax country can make you resident on no days at all. /tools/itr Two Countries, Two Calendars The American extension for people abroad is automatic; the Indian one is not. The American one covers filing but not payment. And the foreign-account report runs on a mechanism of its own. One board instead of three. /tools/deadlines What Can Actually Leave India Two annual limits on moving money out of India, four times apart, for two different people — and which is yours turns on foreign-exchange residency, which is neither your passport nor your tax status. /tools/lrs Your 401(k) When You Leave the US Nothing makes you cash it out because you left. People do it anyway on the way to the airport and pay a penalty plus tax on the whole balance. What actually changes is which regime applies — and when. /tools/401k The Sixty Thousand Dollar Line A non-citizen not domiciled here gets a credit sheltering about sixty thousand dollars of American assets. A citizen gets a figure in the millions. Same assets, different person, and most families on a visa have never heard the number. /tools/estate The Contributions That Do Not Follow You Home Every US pay cheque funds an entitlement that needs about ten years before it pays anything. Agreements let a split career be added together. India does not have one, and has never had one. /tools/totalization The First-Year Choice Arrive mid-year and you usually fail the day count, which makes you a non-resident for all of it. A statutory election can change that — thirty-one consecutive days, and seventy-five percent to year end. /tools/dualstatus One Contract Convert a non-deductible IRA contribution to a Roth and it is nearly tax-free — unless you hold any other pre-tax IRA. The statute treats them all as one contract, and the balance that ruins it is usually an old rollover. /tools/roth Coming Back Into Compliance Years of unreported Indian accounts, and an internet full of penalty figures. The IRS publishes a route back for failures that were not deliberate — and one of its two gates closes on an event outside your control. /tools/streamlined Four Residencies, One Calendar You do not have a residency — you have four, decided by unrelated tests that read the same travel history and routinely disagree. Both countries can call you resident in the same year. /tools/residencies The Window Move back to India and you are Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident for two or three years, with foreign income generally outside the Indian net. It closes on a date you can calculate, and most people find it after it has shut. /tools/rnor EMI Channel Guard Your Indian home-loan EMI is still auto-debiting a resident account that should not exist. The channel rule, and the NACH mandate step people skip even after fixing the account. /tools/emi-channel CIBIL Passport Checker Your Indian credit history CAN follow you — at a short, named list of lenders. Which ones, by corridor, verified against each partner’s own announcement rather than a blog’s shorthand. /tools/cibil-passport The Eight-Year Line The exit tax is not only for citizens who renounce — it reaches a long-term resident who gives up a green card. Eight of the last fifteen TAXABLE years, which arrives sooner than elapsed time suggests. /tools/exittax What Your Foreign Pension Does To Your US Benefit For decades a foreign pension cut your American Social Security. Both provisions that did that have ended — and the repeal reaches back to January 2024. The folklore has outlived the law. /tools/wep The Tie-Breaker Both countries can call you resident in the same year. Article 4 resolves it — as an ordered cascade, not a weighing of factors. And for a long-term green-card holder, claiming it can trigger the exit tax. /tools/tiebreak The Safe Harbour That Isn’t There Pay in last year’s tax and the penalty cannot reach you — except the statute switches that off if there was no full prior year. Every first-year arrival is in that group, in the year income is least predictable. /tools/safeharbour The Pension Question A private pension is taxable only where you live; social security only where it came from. Two paragraphs, opposite directions — and both turn on a word most people have never read: periodic. /tools/pension Thirty Percent, At Source Nobody sends a bill. The law makes the PAYER deduct thirty percent before the money moves, which is why the first you know of it is the amount that arrives. /tools/withholding The One-Shot Election Electing a nonresident spouse into joint filing makes them a US resident for the WHOLE year — worldwide income and all. Revoke it once and the statute bars that couple from ever electing again. /tools/spouseelection The Nominee Is Not the Heir You filled in the form on every account and it felt settled. Nomination decides who gets PAID; succession decides who OWNS. The Supreme Court settled the shares half in December 2023 — and life insurance runs the other way. /tools/nominee The Marital Deduction You Do Not Have Every ordinary estate plan assumes everything passes to the spouse untaxed. That is withdrawn when the surviving spouse is not a citizen — and the test is the survivor’s status, not the decedent’s. /tools/qdot What Nobody Claimed A dormant deposit transfers after ten years. Shares transfer after seven — and it is the shareholding that moves, not the dividend nobody banked. The shorter clock is on the asset least likely to be watched. /tools/unclaimed One and the Same Person Two documents, two versions of your name, one system treating them as two people. It is rarely an error — and what fixes it is a documentary chain, not a corrected spelling. The heaviest remedy is the one most guidance sells. /tools/samename The Threshold You Cannot Split The report costs nothing. Dividing the money between you so nobody is over the line is the most common form of a separate offence — and a travelling party gets added together anyway. /tools/cash The Account You Should Not Cash Out Almost everything you leave behind gets worse when you go. This one does not — the test is what the money was spent on, not where you live. Cashing out on the way to the airport is the expensive move. /tools/hsa The Cheque That Stops After Six Months Clearing forty quarters is one question. Being paid once you have gone home is another — and for a non-citizen the default is that it stops. Identical earnings records, opposite answers, separated by a passport. /tools/ssabroad

Visa & status17

Rule Change Radar The rules keep moving. One-line readings of the changes that matter, each signed by a named counsel and a cross-border CPA — or not published at all. /tools/radar Layoff Day One Visa status, COBRA, the ACA Marketplace and a 401(k) loan all start their own clocks the same day. One dated board instead of four industries that never talk to each other. /tools/layoff The 60-Day Clock H-1B portability starts the moment a new petition is FILED, not approved — most people wait for the approval that was never the deadline. What the grace period actually lets you do, dated. /tools/60day A Visa Is Not An Entry Ticket A visa is permission to travel to a port of entry and ask. Admission is a separate decision made there, and the law puts the burden on the traveller at both points. /tools/poe The Thirty-Day Door An expired visa stamp is not the obstacle people assume for a short trip to Canada or Mexico. A regulation extends it automatically — and one condition catches people doing the responsible thing. /tools/stamping The Continuous Residence Clock Two clocks run at once and almost nobody states them correctly: continuous residence, which one long trip can break, and physical presence, which every day abroad depletes. A trip can pass one and fail the other. /tools/citizenship One Passport Indian citizenship does not wait to be given up — it terminates on acquisition of another, and the foreign passport is conclusive proof it happened. A parent’s renunciation takes the minor children with it. /tools/onepassport H-4 EAD & Spouse Restart The automatic extension ended 30 October 2025, and most advice has not caught up. The 180-day filing window and the (removed) up-to-540-day extension, kept carefully apart. /tools/h4 The Two-Year Rule The J-1 home residence requirement bars three applications — immigrant visa, permanent residence, and H or L — and nothing else. Which is why nobody meets it until they are holding a job offer. /tools/j1 The Status Clock “What is the date I stop being temporary?” Two corridors give you a date you can count today. One is rewriting the rule that produces it. Three give you no date at all — for three unrelated reasons. /tools/clock The Two-Year Green Card A divorce does not end a marriage-based green card. The ninety-day deadline everybody quotes binds couples filing together — a waiver can be filed at any time before a removal order, and almost nobody in that position is told so. /tools/i751 When the Status Was Theirs Your right to be here was never your own. When the marriage ends the status ends the same day, with no grace period — and the route people are sent toward first is not open to the spouse of an H-1B holder at all. /tools/i765v The Card and the Passport It Names “You don’t need to reissue any more” is one third of the rule — it is banded by age. And if your card names a passport you have stopped using, that old passport is a travel document, not a keepsake. /tools/oci The Box You Must Not Tick You do not have to vote — registering is itself the act. No intent required, no general waiver, and it can permanently bar naturalisation. The usual fact pattern is a licensing counter, not a decision to vote. /tools/vote The Trip That Abandons Your Application Applied for is not obtained. The dual-intent exception is real and it is the half everyone quotes — the other half is four conditions tested when you come back, two of which stop being yours the moment you board. /tools/parole The Rule That Frightens More People Than It Reaches The trigger is the filing date, not the decision. Benefits received before the switch stay judged by the old standard. And around a million people are projected to give up help — many of whom the test never reaches. /tools/publiccharge The STEM OPT Extension Filing Window USCIS must RECEIVE it before your current OPT expires — after it lapses is too late. Your ninety-day-early date and your hard deadline, computed from your own end date. /tools/optstem

Loans & debt13

Rent Into Credit Your biggest monthly payment is invisible to every credit bureau by default. Esusu, Piñata, RentTrack and LevelCredit compared on price and bureau coverage — unranked, unconflicted. /tools/rent-report Auto Refi Alarm You stopped being subprime eight months ago. Your car loan has not noticed — the spread sitting on the table, against Experian’s own quarterly rate table. /tools/auto-refi First Car, Fair Rate Having no US credit file is not a low score — it is commonly priced like the worst one on the board anyway. The band you are likely quoted, and the two levers that move it, before the dealership visit. /tools/auto BNPL Blind Spot Eighteen months of perfect Klarna repayment, and it never showed up anywhere — because until 2025, it usually wasn’t reported. What Affirm’s new reporting and FICO’s new scores actually changed, and what they didn’t. /tools/bnpl Cross-Border Default Map What the missed EMI in Pune actually does to your life in Dallas — and what it does not. National-scope bureaus, guarantor exposure that never sleeps, and the wilful-defaulter classification most people are nowhere near. /tools/default-map Layoff Debt Triage Four debts, four different rulebooks. What protects each one, and why calling before you miss a payment matters more than the order you call in. /tools/layoff-debt Deposit Alternative Decoder Three months’ deposit, or a fee that never comes back — priced as the loan it secretly is. Enter your own quoted numbers and see the real break-even. /tools/deposit-alt 401(k) Loan vs Personal Loan Borrowing from yourself vs a thin-file APR — the honest comparison, including the scenario generic sites assume away: what happens if this job ends before it is repaid. /tools/401k-loan Cosigner Release Runbook Your uncle cosigned in 2022. Set him free — it helps your file too. Release is an application most people never file, not a status that arrives on its own. /tools/cosigner-release India Education Loan Optimiser Prepay the 10.5% INR loan, or invest the dollars? The guaranteed side, computed honestly — including the RBI’s new prepayment-charge ban and how Section 80E actually interacts with paying it down early. /tools/eduloan-optimiser Gold Loan Decoder The family’s fastest rupee — arranged in a day, understood never. The new tiered LTV caps, and why an NRI co-signing from abroad cannot pledge or redeem the physical collateral themselves. /tools/gold-loan Student Loan Refinance Radar You borrowed at a double-digit rate for want of a local credit file. That stops being true on a date you can work out — and nobody tells you. Quotes no rate, on purpose. /tools/refi Fighting a Medical Collection Off Your Credit Report A bill your insurer is still processing is not yet a debt at all. Bureaus generally wait before reporting one — and once reported, the ordinary dispute right applies. /tools/meddebt

Parents & family10

The Tail End Their age, your visits per year, the official life tables: the number of visits left — and the one action that changes it. Computed in your browser. /tools/tailend The Parent Visit Clock The visa date is not the date that governs — the I-94 date is. Miss it by a little and it is paperwork; miss it by more than a hundred and eighty days and leaving triggers a three-year bar on coming back. /tools/parents The Five-Year Wait You sponsor a parent, the green card is approved, they arrive at sixty-eight — and Medicare will not take them for five years, because they never worked here. The date families plan around is the wrong anniversary. /tools/parenthealth The Ten-Year Contract Sponsoring a relative means a stack of forms. One is a contract the person you sponsored can personally enforce against you, that survives divorce, and that forty quarters of work will not end for a parent. /tools/i864 The Returning Resident Line A returning permanent resident is not treated as seeking admission — that is the rule, and it is in their favour. But the exceptions are a closed list, and one absence of over a hundred and eighty days is on it. /tools/greencard Claim Reality Check Sold on a maximum, settled on a definition. “Acute onset of a pre-existing condition” is five gates, not one — which is how the emergency gets paid and everything after it refused, both correctly. /tools/acuteonset IR-5 Cohort Timeline Two practices, same petition, same year, estimates that differ severalfold. Neither is lying. Four questions that explain all of it — and the gate nobody mentions: a green card holder cannot petition a parent at all. /tools/ir5 When Someone Dies Far From Home The most foreseeable emergency of the parent-visit corridor, and the one nobody looks up beforehand. The first decision arrives inside seventy-two hours; almost everything that helps takes an hour, months earlier. /tools/repatriation Medicare and a Life Split Across Two Countries It almost never pays for care received abroad. And declining Part B without qualifying employer coverage can attach a penalty for as long as you hold it — two traps pulling opposite ways. /tools/medicare Does the Kiddie Tax Reach Your Child’s Account? It does not stop at eighteen — a full-time student under twenty-four can still be covered. And it never touches wages from an actual job, only investment income. /tools/kiddietax

Home & property9

Property Sale Sequencer Form 13 takes about two months. If you sign the sale agreement first, the withholding is set before you ever think about tax. Work the calendar backwards from your date. /tools/sale Rent vs Buy Under Visa Uncertainty The standard calculator assumes you choose your exit date. Priced at three, five and ten years out, with the FIRPTA withholding a non-resident seller faces — the branch every other calculator misses. /tools/rentbuy What a Landlord May and May Not Ask Arriving without an American credit file is a real disadvantage and most advice about it is folklore. This is the part that is not — the legal floor, which sits further in your favour than most newcomers realise. /tools/rentkit Two Hundred And Fifty Thousand, Fixed The home-sale exclusion has no citizenship requirement in the statute — but the amount has never been indexed for inflation, and years of price appreciation can quietly outrun it. /tools/homesale Visa-Holder Mortgage Matcher Twenty percent down, three years left on the visa, two years of local credit — almost none of it is the rule. It is one lender’s overlay, and the next lender’s is different. The one thing that genuinely changed closed a door in May 2025. /tools/mortgage Buying in India From Abroad Three things decide whether this goes well and none of them is the rate: whether the category is open to you at all, whether the money travels the channel the rules require — and what letting it out does to your tenant. /tools/nriloan Fifteen Percent of the Price, Not the Gain Sell US property as a foreign person and the buyer withholds on the price, not the profit — so breaking even still costs you at closing. The exact mirror of the Indian rule, usually met years apart. /tools/firpta The 45/180-Day Exchange Clock Both deadlines start on the same day and run at the same time — they do not stack. Miss the forty-five-day identification and the exchange fails with months still left on the other clock. /tools/1031 Reading Your Escrow Shortage Letter A shortage is generally repayable over at least twelve months, not a lump-sum demand — and the cushion that produced it is itself capped by regulation. /tools/escrow

Work & pay9

The Clawback Ledger You resign and an invoice arrives itemising immigration costs "to be repaid in full". Some lines can be legitimate. Several commonly are not, and the regulation is unusually clear about which. /tools/clawback Sponsorship Red Flags Benched time is still paid time, and the company’s own petition costs cannot come out of your wage. What your employer owes you while you are still there — and why raising it is protected. /tools/redflags One Hundred And Eighty Days People decline offers and stay years too long because they think changing jobs restarts the green-card queue. One sentence of statute says otherwise, and it is short enough to read yourself. /tools/portability Visa-Adjusted Emergency Fund Three to six months is an estimate of how long a job search takes. Tie your status to the job and the search is capped by statute — so the rule does not under-provide, its reasoning stops applying. /tools/runway The Vests That Follow You The last payslip does not end it. Equity is allocated by where you worked between grant and vest, not where you live when it vests — and the state applies its own formula, to which “I don’t live there any more” is not an answer. /tools/equity The Section 3 Deadline Nobody Puts on a Calendar A work-authorization document must be reverified BY its expiry date, with no grace period. A green card carries an expiry date too and never triggers this at all — confusing the two goes wrong in both directions. /tools/i9 The Sixty-Day COBRA Countdown Sixty days to elect, counted from whichever notice landed LATER — not from your last day at work, which is the date most people anchor to and the reason the window gets missed. /tools/cobra Why the Severance Check Looks More Taxed Severance is a supplemental wage, withheld at a flat rate instead of your brackets — so it can look savagely taxed and not be. What was withheld is not what you owe. /tools/severance The FSA Forfeiture Deadline Use-it-or-lose-it is the default, not the exception. A grace period or a carryover exists only if your employer opted in — and a plan may offer one, never both. /tools/fsa

Study & education7

Residency Rules Atlas In-state tuition on a visa, all fifty states: the rule, the H-4 and F-1 answers, and the citation — the table that did not exist until now. /tools/residency Education Remittance TCS Shield Loan-funded or self-funded decides whether tax is collected at source on an education remittance at all — and the bank needs proof before the transfer, not after. Verified against the Finance Act 2025. /tools/edu-tcs Section 80E Optimiser Whoever’s name is on the education loan is whoever gets to deduct its interest for eight years — never whoever repays it. Set at signing, unfixable after — check it before you sign. /tools/80e 529 vs Leaving The fear is the education fund is wasted if the family goes home. Eligibility turns on federal student-aid participation, not location — and plenty of universities abroad participate. The question has a real answer. /tools/529 The Age-Out Clock A child on a parent’s petition stops being a “child” at twenty-one, and the queue is longer than that. But the statute does not use the age on the birth certificate — it subtracts the years the petition sat pending. /tools/cspa The Refund Nobody Claims Service by a nonresident student is outside the definition of employment, so Social Security and Medicare tax never applied. Payroll withholds it anyway, every year, from people who never owed it. /tools/fica Kid Status Ladder Dependent status ends on the twenty-first birthday, with no grace period at all. The reassuring thing you have read about turning twenty-one is about a different birthday entirely. /tools/kid21

Arriving5

Landing Month One The first ninety days are a sequence, not a list — one runbook per corridor, each step in the order that unblocks the next, ticked off in your browser. /tools/landing Credit From Zero The free app shows you a score in month one. The lender sees nothing until month six. The dated 12-month ladder — no products ranked, ever. /tools/credit The Travel Log Seven tools here run on the same raw material — where you were, and when — and every one used to ask you again. Enter each trip once, stored in your browser only, and let each test read it. /tools/travel The SSN Sequencing Check The SSA cannot issue a number it cannot verify. Applying before work authorization is provable — or before SEVIS has confirmed an F-1/J-1 arrival — is the commonest reason a first application comes back rejected. /tools/ssn The Record That Actually Controls Your Stay Your visa is permission to ask for admission. The I-94 is what governs how long you may stay — and a wrong one is fixed at CBP or at USCIS depending entirely on what is wrong. /tools/i94fix

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