American Expat's Guide to Easier and Faster FBAR Filing

The FBAR problem

If you're an American living abroad you know that doing your FBAR for the US government every year is a huge pain.

If you don’t know, trust me.  It is.

This easy-to-use Guide will save you hours, minimize stress, and satisfy government record keeping requirements.

If you only have one or two bank accounts, FBARs aren’t too tedious. However, if you also have different types of accounts or joint account owners, FBARs become much more complicated and time consuming.

Many types of foreign accounts are reportable, not just bank accounts.  Do you have a non-US PayPal account?  A life insurance policy with cash value?  A gold bullion account?  Signing authority for an organization?  A credit balance with your bookie?  Any account that smells like usable money is probably reportable on the FBAR.

FBARs demand much more information than a single number, information that takes time to find, organize, and enter into the FBAR submission form.

This FBAR Guide organizes all your relevant FBAR information in a single location, a spreadsheet, that can be easily reused, with minor modifications, from year to year.  That saves a lot of your time.

Moreover, your stored information is organized to parallel the data entry requirements of the FBAR form itself, which makes form completion easier and faster.

You’ll still have to dig through files to get all the information you need – but only the first time you use the Guide.  Subsequent years will go much faster because you’ll reuse almost all of your work from this year.

How the Guide works

Before you start work on the FBAR form, you’ll receive:

• details on types of reportable financial accounts;
• information about what’s needed for each account type; 
• directions on how to calculate maximum yearly accounts balances;
• automatic calculation of exchange rates; and
• a customized easy-to-use spreadsheet for entering FBAR information
• in a format that facilitates FBAR completion.

When working on your FBAR you’ll learn how to:

• open the FBAR form in one window and the spreadsheet in another;
• copy a cell in the spreadsheet, toggle to the FBAR;
• paste the info into the appropriate FBAR location;
• toggle back to the spreadsheet; and
• repeat until the FBAR is complete.

After completing the FBAR, you’ll know how to:

• create a spreadsheet page for next year
• that will use information you’ve collected this year;
• For your continuing accounts, you’ll then be able to
• reuse unchanging information from your spreadsheet
• like names, address, account numbers, and
• only enter the yearly max for each account next year.

Is your time worth something?  If so, the spreadsheet is easy to use – even if you’ve never used one before.  This is a no brainer.