@8extra , for purposes of form 2555 ( and generally the Physical Presence Test ), TurboTax is looking for the number of days you spent away from your Tax Home country --- its general interest is in the days spent in the USA ( including flying over US landmass.. It does this for two purposes :
1. to determine if you meet the 330 full ( 24 hour ) days spent away from the US and generally in your tax-home country It is not interested in days spent in other Non-US countries. Of course there are ends, ifs and buts in this.
2. It is trying to allocate your earnings that could be attributable to time spent in the USA on business for purposes of determining the Foreign Earned Income excludable.
Does this help ?
@pk Yes, that makes sense. So, I can just put in the dates I was in the USA in this section for Turbo tax to check? My tax home country will be Colombia though because I lived there the longest, so do I have to put the dates I was in Colombia too? But I was also in 17 other countries but I didn't want to list all of them if I didn't have to.
@8extra my struggle with your situation is as follows :
(a) Lack of knowledge of all the countries you worked in -- were you employed by an entity and if so where is it located?
(b) what was the nature of your work ?
What we need to understand how to determine whether you were an itinerant worker or had a tax home ( that you always returned to after your trips to pother countries) .
Next we need to be sure that while you travelled from one country to another, we count only the days that were in foreign countries including its territorial waters --- international waters cannot be counted as days spent abroad.
Please could you tell me more ?
In the meantime you can familiarize yourself with pages 15 and 17 of IRS pub. 54 --- >
pk
Hi @pk , spent 334 days out of the USA. I counted only the full 24 hour days outside the USA, I also excluded the days that took more than 24 hours over international waters.
I traveled through these countries:
Albania
Austria
Bosnia
Colombia
Croatia
Czech Republic
Dominican Republic
Greece
Hungary
Istanbul
Italy
Japan
Montenegro
Philippines
Portugal
Serbia
Spain
Thailand
I lived in Colombia for 4.5 months and returned there after leaving so that's why I was thinking that was my tax home. I'm employed by a USA company that gives me a W-2.
b. I do digital marketing.