In 2010, when President Obama signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act into law – hidden inside a domestic jobs bill few still remember, called the HIRE Act – Rebecca Lammers had been only been living in London for a few years, although she'd done a couple of semesters of college abroad (in Ecuador and London).

Americans living in Thailand say their continuing calls for the U.S. to provide them with Covid-19 vaccinations – in recognition of their status as U.S. taxpayers, owing to America's citizenship-based tax regime – still are not being acted upon as they would like, even as the numbers of infections and Covid-related deaths continue to rise steadily in the Southeast Asian country.

Almost nine in 10 U.S. expats say they are "caught between two systems" when it comes to their banking and tax matters, according to the latest data to emerge from a major survey of more than 400 Americans who live outside of the U.S., carried out last October and November by the Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO).

(...But FATCA not directly to blame)

For more than a decade, American expats have reported finding it difficult to obtain or maintain a non-U.S. bank account while living overseas, usually owing to the banks' reluctance to have to comply with the 2010 tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA. But a new survey confirms something many have also been saying: That even U.S. banks often don't want U.S. expat clients either.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has at last acknowledged the American expatriate voter, with a letter "to all Americans Residing Abroad" in which he pledges that a Biden-Harris administration would "work in partnership with you on all the issues that impact your lives and well-being as Americans resident abroad, including reviewing the barriers to accessing banking and financial services".

 Thun Financial Advisors, a Madison, Wisconsin-based advisory firm that over the past 12 years has managed to build a business servicing some 500 clients in more than 50 countries around the world, is planning to grow its business catering to U.S. expats and international clients of other nationalities, after it’s acquired over the next few months by Creative Planning, one of the largest Registered Investment Advisory (RIA) firms in the U.S.

The U.S. Ambassador to Mexico has urged U.S. citizens who are resident in the country to "think long and hard" about the possibility of returning to the U.S. in response to the growing coronavirus pandemic.

Ambassador Christopher Landau made his call in a YouTube video posted on the Embassy's website last Friday, and reinforced it on Tuesday afternoon Mexico time, in what was billed as a "virtual town hall for American Citizens in Mexico", to which residents and others were invited to submit questions in advance (See photo, above)... 

A reader asks: ‘How do I navigate the shoals of being between U.S. and French citizenship, without having to put all my assets into cash and sticking them under my mattress for a few years?’

Saranac Partners, a Mayfair, London-based wealth manager for private clients and high-net worth individuals founded in 2016, has become the third London-based wealth manager in a month to unveil a wealth management service for U.S. expatriates.

The combination of significantly lower prices for desireable London property and a strong U.S. dollar – both seen as at least in part as the result of uncertainty over Britain's political future as a result of the UK's Brexit troubles – has seen at least some wealthy Americans snapping up some of the most expensive of these London properties, at reduced prices that most people would still consider to be eye-watering.