Address while away

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My husband and I are about to begin our first travel assignment; it looks like we MAY be heading to New Haven, CT! I have a question about tax homes - that whole aspect overwhelms me (as if everything else I need to get done in the next month doesn't). We are currently renting an apartment and don't own any property/house. We are planning on using my parents' address for our mail, billing address, etc. I've read some about tax homes but am unsure as to what that means for us since we don't actually own a house. Will we still need to "go home" every so often as if we owned the home? Is this even the best alternative to a more permanent address while traveling?

Any and ALL input is helpful! Thanks everyone!

Specializes in BMT.

In your first paragraph you mentioned a historical home. Over the years throughout and after college and grad school, I have maintained my mother's home as my "permanent residence" to the effect that the reason why I only have a single state license in NC is because I still declared her home in California as my permanent residence; and in fact still kept her address on my drivers license. My mother does, also, live alone, and bank statements with charges in my hometown prove that I do return quite regularly. Are you saying that all of this evidence could potentially be sufficient proof that I maintain this as my permanent residence? I was always under the impression that in the eyes of the IRS, the world is black and white and there is no grey...

OP, I hope you're finding all this information useful! Almost every day I learn something new about the world of travel nursing.

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There is a lot of gray in tax matters, which is why creative tax lawyers make so much money. Particularly with tax homes it will often end up being a preponderance of the evidence, not just tick off one, two, three. If one factor is a bit weak, then one tries to strengthen another factor. In this case, you are shifting your current tax home in NC to CA. Sure you maintained a permanent address in CA, but that is different from a tax home where you made most of your income if not all in NC. Shifting your tax home at the exact time you become a traveler is a particularly muddy area. I would suggest professional advice.

By the way, if you read the relevant IRS publications, moving into a residence with a relative is supposed to strengthen your case. But that is just one of many things to weigh into the overall picture.

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Specializes in BMT.

Very interesting. Sounds like to be on the safe side I should either pay my mom rent while I'm away OR work agency there over the holidays. Oh living in NC was far before I was a travel RN. I no longer maintain a residence there :)

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Living at home now? Perfect!

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Y'all have been so extremely helpful! Whoo boy, there were so many things that I did not consider when we jumped into this travel nursing thing, but my husband and I are both very excited to start this adventure! We are both very grateful to all that answered and gave us advice!

I have what may seem like a stupid question, but it is something I started thinking about while reading y'all's responses about licensure. My husband and I both have compact Texas licenses. If we claim ourselves as itinerant (which seems like the easiest and most realistic option for us right now), will we still be able to practice under our compact licenses in other compact states? Or will not having a residence in Texas make this no longer an option?

Once again, thank you for your responses!

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As always, questions like this are best answered by your BON. It is possible to be itinerant for tax purposes and be considered to be residing in Texas for compact licensure, even though you just have an address of convenience. There are real risks, and personally in that situation, I would want an opinion from the BON in writing. Just like with a tax home, I would not take actions that suggest you have abandoned Texas, like registering a car in another state.

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On 3/20/2014 at 11:31 PM, Zjinn said:

When my wife and I started traveling, we didn't want a home to have to worry about so we sold our home. Our initial plan was to use our daughter's address to receive mail and claim as a tax home. Thankfully we have a really good accountant, who specializes in full-time travelers. He talked us out of that in a hurry.

He said we would need to be paying year-round, fair market value rent to our daughter, to be able to claim her home as a tax home. Even then it could be up to the judgement of the IRS whether we qualified for a tax home, should we be audited. He did a total cost comparison of what we would spend with and without a rental tax home. Ned's figures are really close to what our breakdown was. Which for us meant that unless we were going to be spending a significant amount of time "at home," it didn't make financial sense for us to pay rent somewhere. If we would have paid rent in our area, plus at least a couple of trips home per year, we would have exceeded the tax savings we would have received from having a tax home.

Now for how we did it. South Dakota is a compact nursing state, with no state income tax. It is also the only state in the country that you can become a resident of by spending one night there. We have a mail forwarding company that we pay ~$200 a year to in Rapid City, SD. When we where ready to start traveling, we drove up to SD and signed up with the mail forwarding company. We then spent the night in the hotel across the street, took our hotel receipt (to prove that we had spent the night in the state) and our new SD address to the DMV the next morning and we were officially residents of SD. The guy at the DMV laughed and asked if were were RVers. SD is also the #1 state for full-time RVers to claim as home (for many of the same reasons it's so great for travel nurses). While were were there, we tagged our new truck for just a few dollars and got our SD compact nursing license.

Now we own a home in CA and we pay CA taxes for half a year, since we spend much of our time out here. We still keep our mail-forwarding address in SD, so we can claim SD as home though. That way we keep our compact license and I can still tag our vehicles in SD. My SD tags and vehicle taxes are around 10% of what they would be in CA. And we don't even have to take them to SD. We haven't been back there in over 3 years. They're so travel-friendly that you can do any state or county business by phone and mail.

Hi I have question, so I am new to this traveling nursing. I am looking into get my residency in Texas. If my employer asks for "proof of payment" how did you get away with that? And when you did your taxes how did all of that work?

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"Proof of payment"? Of what and why would an employer be interested? You may be asking about proving a tax home to the IRS or a residence to the BON. The employer won't care unless they have a concern about your compact license. Tread carefully in Texas, the BON is not there to support you. I suspect they may have the highest incidence of discipline cases in the country.

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