Transferring life savings in GBP to US

[seapoodle]

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?

[AmyC · Accepted solution]

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

2. Nothing else to do 🙂