Tax and cross-border residency

On Planning → Residency, you lay out your life as a sequence of stages — a country, an age range, and (optionally) a different annual spend for that stage. A single-country plan is just a timeline with one stage; add a second to model a planned move, a retirement abroad, or splitting time between two countries as you age.

A small gantt-style chart shows the whole timeline at a glance — which country you're resident in at every age from today to your life expectancy.

Once your plan has enough cross-border detail to matter, Ember switches on its full residency simulator: it walks your timeline year by year and, for each period, applies that country's income tax and capital gains rules to the income and gains arising in that period. Where a pension or rental property has a different source country than where you're resident, Ember also applies source-country withholding and routes any double-tax treaty relief between the two.

Simpler, single-country plans use a lighter headline model instead — the same spend-target and savings-rate maths as the rest of the dashboard, without the per-year tax breakdown.

We never hard-code a rate or a threshold in this guide — every jurisdiction's actual rules, confidence level, and source citation live in Ember's versioned tax data, browsable at /countries.

Some countries charge an annual tax on what you own, not just what you earn — Spain's Impuesto sobre el Patrimonio is the best-known example. When a stage of your residency timeline puts you in a country like that, Ember applies the charge each year of that stage: marginal bands on your investable wealth above the country's exemption threshold, in that country's own currency, both while you're still accumulating and through retirement drawdown.

A recurring drag on the pot compounds, so a wealth tax can move a FIRE date more than its headline rate suggests. As with everything else, the actual thresholds and bands live in the versioned tax data at /countries — and the ⓘ Explain trace on any affected figure shows the exact band arithmetic for that year.

Moving countries can change what tax you'd pay on realising an investment gain. On the Residency page, when your timeline includes a move, Ember compares the capital-gains bill if you sold today, in your current country, against the bill if you waited and sold after arriving in the new one — and tells you which is cheaper and roughly by how much.

It also looks at tax-advantaged wrappers (an ISA-style account, for example) that some countries stop recognising once you move — flagging accounts worth liquidating tax-free before you go, rather than letting the new country tax future draws as ordinary investment income. Tick Crystallise when leaving on a stage, or the equivalent toggle on an asset in Assets, to fold that decision into your projected FIRE date.

This is advisory and opt-in — Ember shows you the estimated saving, it never assumes you'll take it.

• Planning → Tax — this tax year's picture: your portfolio by tax wrapper, allowance usage, cross-border pension guidance, and the country-by-country assumptions behind the numbers.
• Planning → Tax over time — the same modelling stretched across your whole retirement, so you can see tax rise and fall as you move between residency stages.
• Planning → Compliance flags — the reporting obligations (not tax bills) a cross-border plan can trigger, informational signposting only.