Zjinn

While I can appreciate you wanting clarification, your responses can be deemed very aggressive, and accusing someone of doing something illegal is definitely not a way to win influence. If this were the first post you had done that in, or I the first person to receive this kind of response, I may have let it pass. Even your concession comes across as condescending. I most certainly do not come here looking for an argument, but I will defend myself. The way I do things may not be conventional, but they are valid and legal. Since you reference both TravelTax and PanTravelers quite often, we know many of the same people. In fact, we've probably met at one the PanTravelers conventions. We try to make it to one at least every couple of years. My wife never passes up a chance to go to Las Vegas. Much of what I have learned and my practice as a traveler has come from sessions during those conventions. I think we're both here for the same reasons. To pass along some of the things we've learned along the way. There is room for more than your way of doing things though.

Without becoming argumentative, I can tell you that you have stepped outside of your expertise in this area. Yes, I can own a vacation home in CA as well as one in Mexico, without claiming either as my residency or my tax home. Yes, I can be a resident of SD, without owning a home there. Yes, I am a legal resident of SD and therefore able to use my SD nursing license as my compact license. As with anything else I do, I did not venture into travel nursing lightly. It was through much research and legal advice. We take one regular contract and one short contract per year, in the area we own a home in CA, which is not a tax home. We are transient workers and do not claim a tax home. That officially puts us in CA less than six months in a calendar year, which is the requirement for residency in CA. We pay income taxes to CA as well as any other state we work in, but we save any other income taxes we would normally owe, because SD has no income tax. You do have a lot of knowledge about travel nursing, I don't anyone here will dispute that. I'm not sure if where you're coming from on this particular subject though. I'm speaking from years of experience and sound legal advice, not my own interpretation of snippets from the internet.

It sounds like you are going into this with the right frame of mind. My only additional advice would be to get one more year in the OR. Two years in your specialty makes you much more marketable to the better contracts. This would also give you more time to save and lower your contract buyout. That sounds like a win-win. Waiting another year may seem like a long time, when you're anticipating something exciting, but it will pay off in the long run. While it may be possible to double your current pay, that is certainly not a given. Banking on that idea could cause a lot of unnecessary grief.

I appreciate the concern, but hopefully you can see from my previous posts that I'm very conscientious about making sure we are above board and legal in all our decisions. We are 100% legal residents of SD. I've seen you get a little overzealous in your responses to other people and telling me I'm doing something illegal is way beyond overzealous. We still owned our home in another state when we became residents of SD. The state of SD, the SD BoN, and the BoN of our home state at the time, were all aware of that and what our plans were. Owning a home somewhere does not automatically make you a resident there. In the past 25+ years, we have owned owned homes in several states which we were not residents. We also own a home in Mexico, and that most certainly does not make us citizens of Mexico. We have very few rights in Mexico, even as homeowners. The home in California is considered a vacation home and while we do spend a lot of time there, it's not enough to warrant residency. What makes you a resident of a state is fulfilling the requirements of residency for that particular state. SD happens to be really easy and very beneficial for travelers. While it's my understanding that it was originally set up that way for retired RVers, it also happens to be excellent for travel nurses. I apologize to the original poster, for this becoming a thread hijack. My original post was to show a valid way to address the "Address while away" concerns. This advice comes with extensive research ahead of time, which included very expensive legal advice, as well as several years of actual practice. Hopefully there are some helpful bits of knowledge, even in the hijacked part.

If you're having to use current paychecks to buy out of your contract, I'm going to assume you don't have a lot of reserves. If that is the case, I would not recommend starting to travel yet. While there is good money to be made traveling, it's not always steady. There can also be major obstacles thrown at you when traveling and some can be very costly. Like driving 2000 miles to a contract and the hospital has overbooked their travel positions. That's always a fun one. You can be left hanging in those circumstances. While there are certainly plenty of travelers who live paycheck to paycheck, it's not for the faint of heart. There's just way more that can go wrong out here than there is for people living paycheck to paycheck in a stable job. It's much more comfortable to be out here with some cushion. A cushion also allows you to be much more choosy in which jobs you will accept. Sometimes having the luxury of waiting a week or two for the perfect assignment to come available can make you thousands of dollars extra.

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.

Could the dual language availability be a relatively new thing? We haven't checked on it in a few years, but the PR BoN told us we would need to be fluent in Spanish to test for a license there. There is definitely no reciprocity. We're currently licensed in 32 states and the Virgin Islands. I thought it a bit strange to be able to get a VI license, but not a PR license.

My wife and I tried to do the same thing in reverse. We really wanted to work in PR and found out we had to be fluent in Spanish to take the licensing exam. That was a surprise and disappointing, because I don't think we ever met anyone in PR who didn't speak English. I can muddle through enough to communicate with my Spanish speaking patients, but would never be able to take a licensing exam in it.

It depends on where you're planning on traveling as to how much you're going to make. I've been offered as low as $17 an hour in NM and FL (I thought they were joking...), to over $100 an hour in CA. Coming from OK, where I made ~$30 an hour, I've always been able to make more as a traveler. You just have to pick the better paying assignments.

As a travel nurse you are expected to be able to walk onto a unit and begin full patient care, much of the time with little to no orientation. That's a tall order for even the most experienced nurses. Even knowing the travel game and with years of ICU experience, I still dread the first couple of shifts on a new assignment. There are a few contracts out there that are desperate enough to take a new grad, but there's a reason they're that desperate. I was hired into a Trauma ICU, right out of school and got my CCRN and TNCC, over the following 2 years before I started traveling. I was still unprepared for some of the things thrown at me when I first started traveling. My only advice is to do yourself a huge favor and get a staff job for a couple of years. You'll have a lot of support as a new staff nurse that will not be available to you as a traveler.

That's good information from Ned and I'll expound on it a little. My wife and I started traveling a few years ago. Our kids are grown, so we didn't really need a home to go back to. We sold our home because we planned on traveling from contract to contract, while taking short vacations in between. Even though we tell every company that we don't own a home and don't pay rent anywhere, every company we have worked for has tried to talk us into claiming a tax home. Fortunately, we started out with a very good accountant who advised us to just take straight taxable hourly pay. It makes a lot of the companies upset to do that and some have even refused, but it's a make or break deal for us. If we ever get audited, I know we're in the clear. We have met travelers at every single contract we've take, who don't have a qualifying tax home, but still claim one. I try to educate them, but recruiters can be very persuasive. A secondary effect to taking a lower hourly wage with a stipend, is your purchasing power. The next time you decide to buy a car or a house. Do you want your wages to show $15-$20 an hour or $40-60 an hour? Your stipend does not count towards your purchasing power. We just bought a house in California. We're from Oklahoma, so we already had sticker shock at California housing costs. I would not have wanted to go to a mortgage company and only been able to show them that we had been making $15 an hour for the last few years.

I'll throw my lot in here as well. The biggest advantage for me is focus. I'm much more focused on school this time around. The age difference hasn't really been a problem that I've noticed. It helps that my wife is in the program with me. We have a good time together and I think that makes people of all ages comfortable to be around us (had to throw that in there in case she's watching ). The biggest disadvantage has been having to keep up a household while in school. I'm the primary breadwinner and have had to keep working full-time while in the program. Fortunately, I have a really good job and they've been understanding of all the time I have to take off (which I still haven't exactly figured out why). If that wasn't the case, I would have had to wait until my wife went through. That and I wish it hadn't taken me 20 years to decide to do this. I'm enjoying the nursing profession much more than I would have ever thought when my wife first started talking to me about it.

I had been dreading my O.B. rotation since I first decided to go to NS, but it actually turned out to be one of my favorite rotations so far. L&D was really interesting, even though the nurses didn't seem excited about having male students there. Postpartum was neither interesting nor fun, but more of a med-surg type (with more demanding patients :wink2: ) The NICU and nursery was what made the rotation so great though. I've never been a baby kind of guy, but I had a great time working with the babies. I think my wife was as surprised as I was. I chock that up to me being too young when our kids were babies. :chuckle I asked the nursery charge nurse how you get a job working in there. She said you have to be willing to work in the whole O.B. dept. for a while. It looks like no nursery work for me...

I'll be graduating in the fall at age 40. My wife and I are going through together, as a second career, so I'm probably having a little different experience than most men in nursing school. Out of a class of 72, we have 12 men ranging from ages 21 to 39. This a record number of men in a single graduating class for our school. It's actually made class a lot of fun to have this many men in there. We're kind of the special ed. group.