Foreign Earned Income Exclusion FEIE - Trips Abroad Summary

[8extra]

Do I have to list all the countries I went to? Or can I just list the time I was in the USA during my 12 months? 

[pk]

@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 ?

[8extra]

@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. 

[pk]

@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 ---  >  

2023 Publication 54 (irs.gov)

pk

[8extra]

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.