To Ernie,
Please allow me to give you more pertinent info about our family. My wife & I have 2 sons and 5 grandchildren that live in Phoenix, Az. That is a 4 1/2 hr drive from Southern Nevada, (Las Vegas, Nv) which is where my wife and I lived & I worked for 253 days in 2021. To put that in perspective, from my house in California to my sons house is an 11 hr drive. To your other point, I could only visit my family in Arizona on weekends & holidays because I was working in Las Vegas, full time, for about 8 1/2 months. This doesn’t suggest that I am trying to show residency in Arizona, but rather that I spent the majority of my time living & working in Las Vegas to be closer to family in Arizona.
As I have mentioned previously and this is important; I have retired from California & I am now in TRANSITION! I haven’t decided where we will end up living, but your example of a California resident that lives in California for 6 or 7 months during the year & 3 or 4 months in Nevada is exactly backwards from my situation. Also, I did not spend the rest of the time traveling. We spent the preponderance of our time in Las Vegas, while I worked and we visited our closest family ties in Arizona, as often as we could when I wasn’t working.
I don’t know if you have ever retired but there are important decisions that have to made like where to buy the next home and my first step was to move to Las Vegas in our RV, to see how we like living and working there. These decisions and plans to sell a house are not made overnight.
I returned to my house in California for a total of 112 days. That’s less than 4 months, just to check on the house. My only “ties” to California now are just a “house” & a drivers license. I will sell the house in California at some point, when I find a new place to move. Do I return to California from Nevada? Yes, but equally as important is that I plan to return to Nevada each time I go to California. My strongest ties now are spending 8 1/2 months living & working in Las Vegas and being closer to our family & warmer weather. I am not staying in Nevada for “transitory purposes” but rather to find a new place to relocate for my retirement. Do you understand?
Next is the fact that I answered all of the California state residency questions in TurboTax honestly and accurately and the TurboTax software has shown me as a part time resident of both California & Nevada and that NONE of the wages that I earned in Nevada are taxable by the state of California. Just my retirement pension should be the only taxable income.
What happened to the rule from California that says “the amount of time you are in California compared to being in another state?” and the “strength of the ties” else where?
I thank you for your input.
