Roth IRA's

Legal Taxes
1

Question: If you’re overseas can you contribute to a Roth IRA?

With the foreign earned income exclusion - a traditional IRA doesn’t make much sense. (No income to deduct from - and you still pay taxes when you withdraw the money)

But, was looking into the Roth IRA’s. Where you make a contribution, don’t
get a tax deduction, but the money/income is tax free when you draw it out.

IRS Pubs on this matter are sufficiently vague…
But, it seems like I’d have to have some US earned income to make a Roth IRA contribution - and it seems like excluding my overseas income would disqualify me.

Is there any reason I couldn’t just declare part of my (foreign) income as US income (by not excluding it) and start a Roth IRA with that amount?

Any comments appreciated.

Cheers all,

2

kevinh,

I suggest you do a search and look a little more closely at some of the other tax related threads, I’ve posted answers to contributions to IRA’s in other threads and the answer to your question is located in one of them…