Hi!
I'm self-employed, all of my income is that of an independent contractor/freelancer, and I spent the entire 2019 living and working outside of the US, freelancing. So all of my income is Foregin Earned Income, and it does qualify for Foregin Earned Income Exclusion, meeting all the requirements.
Now, as I'm trying to file my returns using TurboTax, I can't work out whether I'm supposed to enter my Gross Receipts for 2019 both in the Business Income Section (Self-employed income) AND in the Foreign Income section or not. In other words, am I really supposed to enter the exact same earning (the same amount) twice -- once in each section? This seems counterintuitive. But it seems like that's what the rules imply. However, it all seems kind of vague, and I haven't found a straightforward answer to this anywhere.
The weird thing is, when I enter my total earnings twice (both under Business Income and Foreign income), even though it tells me I'm elgible for Foregin Earned Income Exclusion, the total amount of my tax owed is not reduced at all. And we get an odd situation where ALL of my income is Foregin Earned Income, and it's eligible for Foregin Earned Income Exclusion -- and yet there's no reduction in tax at all compared with if all of it was domestic income. This doesn't make sense to me. And given how low my gross income is, I would expect at least some break.
But I also noticed that TurboTax seems to be letting me to just enter all of my earnings under Foreign Income (and claim full exclusion for it) and leave Business Income blank. And then I owe no tax. The system doesn't seem to force me to enter any Business Income whatsoever. So which is the right way, I wonder? Please advise.
Thanks in advance!
