Transferring life savings in GBP to US

seapoodle — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:59:34 GMT

I moved to the US in 2018, and last year I moved my life savings (acquired slowly over decades when I was not US tax resident) over to a US bank from my UK bank's savings account, and the transfer service I used converted GBP to USD.

The questions I have are:

1. Is this a taxable event

2. If it is, what would be the cost basis?

- would it be the value in USD of the GBP when I received it. This is impossible to know, so would I have to make a reasonable estimate, for example by averaging the annual average exchange rates for all the years over my working life

- would it be the value in USD of the GBP (spot rate) on the date I became tax resident in the US

- would it be the value in USD of the GBP calculated using the average annual exchange rate I used to report the value of of my assets on my 2017 tax return (for consistency).

3. If it is, are the losses and gains just vanilla capital losses/gains, or something special

4. If it is how do I report it in TurboTax? Which forms will get modified?

Re: Transferring life savings in GBP to US

AmyC — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 22:56:51 GMT

1. No, moving money is not taxable when it is from one account to another of yours.

2. Nothing else to do 🙂

topic Re: Transferring life savings in GBP to US in Get your taxes done using TurboTax

Transferring life savings in GBP to US

Re: Transferring life savings in GBP to US