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There's ~90k cap. If your foreign-earned income is less than that, you state the tax paid in Germany and don't need to pay for US taxes. If you make more than ~90k, you have to pay taxes for the amount over ~90k.

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Thanks, yeah, I´m trying to understand that.. Since I need to do it for my wife...

It looks super complex :(

I use TurboTax and it's built into the software finally, and makes this quite simple. Originally they just made you look at the tax form and fill it out yourself, but they've really improved the "foreign american" parts of the tax software in the past two years.

Nice! Which version should I use?

Oh boy,just realised that we need to report the last three years too. Called streamlined process... Can they do that?

You would need to buy past versions of the software I think. I don't know how that works -- I just use my parent's copy every year. You get like 3 licenses whenever you buy the software, so if you know someone else who needs to file maybe you can share ;)

But I think you'll have to print them out and mail them in manually, rather than electronic filing. But I haven't tried myself so I'm not sure.

(Edit: To be clear, the tax software is versioned by tax year. So, "Turbotax 2016" is what I will use this year. So you'd have to buy Turbotax 2015, 2014, and 2013 presumably.)

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