🔄 Updated for 2026 — enrollment deadlines, ACA income thresholds, and COBRA rules verified current as of last review 📖 Reading time: 17 minutes  |  ✍️ ExpatWiki Editorial Team T he email arrived on a Wednesday in late October. Open enrollment closes Friday. Three plan options, a 47-page benefits guide attached, and a decision that would govern every doctor's visit, prescription, and hospital stay for the next twelve months. A data scientist from Hyderabad, six weeks into her first H-1B job in Chicago, stared at terms she'd never encountered — deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, in-network, coinsurance — and picked the plan with the lowest monthly premium because the number was the only one she understood. She spent $4,200 out of pocket that year. The plan next to it: $800. Same employer. Same year. Health insurance open enrollment in the US is a high-stakes annual decision made under time pressure, using terminology most new arrivals have never encountered, for a ...

🔄 Updated for 2026 — Roth IRA contribution limits, MAGI phase-out thresholds, and eligibility rules verified current as of last review 📖 Reading time: 18 minutes  |  ✍️ ExpatWiki Editorial Team T he first question a software developer from Chennai asked her HR department after starting her H-1B job in Austin was about the 401(k). The second was about health insurance. The Roth IRA never came up — not because nobody mentioned it, but because she assumed, like most expats do, that retirement accounts beyond the employer plan were something for citizens and permanent residents. Three years later, talking to a tax professional for the first time, she discovered she'd been eligible the entire time. The retirement account she could have started in month one — with tax-free growth compounding since then — simply didn't exist, because the question was never asked. A Roth IRA is available to anyone with earned income in the United States and a Social Security Number — inc...

🔄 Updated for 2026 — FBAR deadlines, penalty figures, and FinCEN 114 filing process verified current 📖 Reading time: 18 minutes  |  ✍️ ExpatWiki Editorial Team T he FBAR letter arrived on a Tuesday morning and looked, at first glance, like every other piece of government correspondence an H-1B holder receives — dense, formal, and stamped with an agency acronym that meant nothing until it did. The engineer from Pune who'd been working in San Jose for three years opened it expecting a routine IRS notice. It wasn't from the IRS. It was from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and it was about bank accounts in India that he'd held for years before arriving in the US, accounts he'd never thought to mention to anyone because he'd never used them during his time in America, and because nobody had ever told him he was supposed to. His accounts had never exceeded $15,000 combined. He hadn't known the requirement existed — the failure wasn't ...