Years after an international move, a preparer asks a simple question: what did you pay for those shares? What was the account balance the day you left? What was the exchange rate when you bought the apartment?

And the person discovers that the answer lives behind a closed account, a bank that purges statements after seven years, an employer portal that deactivated with their badge, or a brokerage that won’t mail records to a foreign address. The tax question was easy. The records question is now a project.

Most cross-border tax pain that surfaces late isn’t caused by rules people broke. It’s caused by numbers nobody wrote down while they were still one login away. The week before a move is when every record is at its cheapest.

What to capture, and why each one matters later

Statements for every financial account, as of the move date. Balances near the departure date can matter for one or both countries’ rules, depending on the corridor and asset type — and the year-of-move disclosure filings will want each account’s peak value, not just what it held on moving day. Download the full year, every account, including the dormant ones you plan to close. Closed accounts are precisely the ones whose records vanish.

Cost basis for everything you own that could ever be sold. Purchase confirmations for shares and funds, closing documents for property, records of major improvements. Two systems will eventually measure your gains, sometimes from different starting points and in different currencies. A missing basis record doesn’t make tax go away — it can make the taxable amount larger if the taxpayer cannot substantiate cost, because unprovable cost tends to resolve against the taxpayer.

The exchange-rate context. For big holdings, note what the rate was when you acquired them. Historical rates are reconstructable, but tying the right date to the right transaction years later is the hard part — the compounding problem described in * One Income, Two Currencies: Which Exchange Rate You’re Supposed to Use*.

Evidence of the move itself. The departure date sounds unforgettable and is often disputed or reconstructed later — residency for both countries can hinge on it. Keep the one-way ticket, the lease start or end, the shipping invoice, the employer letter. And keep evidence of ties being cut, which matters enormously for sticky jurisdictions (* You Left the Country — But Did You Leave Your State?*).

Pension and employer-plan records. Plan statements, contribution histories, vesting summaries. Employer portals are the fastest-expiring access you have, and foreign pensions are among the messiest things to characterize later without paperwork.

Prior tax returns, both countries eventually. The last several years of returns and assessments, as PDFs in your own storage rather than inside a preparer’s portal or a government login tied to an old address or phone number.

The principle underneath the list

Every item follows one rule: capture anything whose access depends on a relationship the move will end — an employment, an address, a phone number for two-factor codes, a banking relationship. Institutions keep records on their schedule, not yours.

None of this requires understanding the tax rules that will eventually consume these documents. That’s what makes it the perfect pre-move task: an afternoon of downloads, zero judgment calls, and it quietly caps the cost of every future surprise.

← Back to Staying Compliant · The Guide