A few months ago, North Carolina sent me a jury duty summons.

This was impressive for two reasons.

First, I haven’t lived in North Carolina in years.

Second, I live in Colombia, which is not exactly around the corner.

I’m roughly 5,000 miles from that courthouse, but as far as my old state was concerned, I was apparently still hanging around, ready to perform my civic duties on a Tuesday.

And that gets to one of the least exciting, most important, and most expensive things nobody explains properly when Americans move abroad:

You can leave the country and your state can still think you live there.

Not emotionally. Legally.

And if your state still thinks you live there, it may also think it deserves a piece of your income.

That is the part people miss.

They assume that once they move overseas, state income tax just fades away like an old roommate who never updates their address.

It doesn’t.

You have to actually break up with your state. Properly. In writing. With evidence. With closure. Possibly with less drama than my last relationship, but not by much.

This is the word that runs the entire story.

Not where you are.

Not where you’re staying.

Not where you had lunch.

Domicile is where a state believes your real, permanent home is. The place it thinks you’ll always come back to. Legally, it’s weirdly clingy.

You can spend most of the year abroad and still have one U.S. state treating you like you never really left.

And here’s the trap: you do not end domicile by leaving. You end domicile by establishing a new one somewhere else.

Until that happens, your old state’s position is very simple:

“You didn’t move. You’re just on a long trip.”

That is not an exaggeration. That is basically how many states think.

This is the part that quietly wrecks people.

If you’ve looked into expat taxes at all, you’ve probably heard of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, or FEIE. For 2026, it lets qualifying Americans exclude around $132,900 of foreign earned income from their federal taxes.

That is real.

That is useful.

That is not your state’s problem.

Because the FEIE is federal.

Your state did not sign that agreement.

So people move abroad, exclude their income federally, owe little or nothing to the IRS, and assume they’re done.

Meanwhile, their old state is sitting there saying, “That’s adorable. We still want our cut.”

That is one of the most expensive expat tax misunderstandings there is.

Winning against the IRS does not mean you’ve won against Sacramento, Albany, Richmond, or Trenton.

Federal and state are two separate fights.

This is where your strategy starts to depend on geography.

There are basically three kinds of states in this conversation.

The first group is the easy group: states with no state income tax. Florida, Texas, Nevada, Washington, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Tennessee, and New Hampshire. If your domicile is one of those, there’s a lot less to argue about because there’s no income tax sitting there waiting for you.

The second group is the normal group. These states have income tax, but if you genuinely leave, change your paperwork, establish a new home, and stop leaving a trail back to them, they generally move on.

Then there’s the third group.

The stalkers.

These are the states that treat your departure like a personal betrayal. California. New York. Virginia. New Jersey. A few others. These states do not hear “I moved abroad” and shrug. They hear “interesting, let’s verify that.”

So before you do anything else, you need to know which state you are actually breaking up with.

Because leaving California is not the same administrative experience as leaving North Carolina.

One is a breakup.

The other is a breakup with a follow-up audit.

If you want the strongest story possible, the gold standard is this:

You leave your old state, establish domicile in a no-tax state, and then move abroad.

That creates a very clean legal narrative.

“I left North Carolina, became a Florida resident, then moved to Colombia.”

That story works.

What doesn’t work nearly as well is:

“I live abroad now, but my driver’s license is still from my old state, my voter registration is still there, my car is still registered there, my bank statements still go there, and I kind of just assumed everyone would understand my vibe.”

Your vibe is not evidence.

States look at patterns. Signals. Clues. Threads.

So if you want them to stop treating you like a resident, you have to cut the threads.

The biggest ones are:

Driver’s license.

This is one of the loudest indicators of domicile there is. If your old state issued your current license, that state is still hearing, “I belong here.”

Voter registration.

Voting is a serious declaration of home. If you’re still registered there, you’re still telling the state it matters.

Mailing address.

If your banks, brokerages, IRS correspondence, and credit cards still go to the old address, you are feeding the fiction that you never really left.

Property.

If you still own a home there and keep it available for yourself, that looks like home. Renting it out genuinely is different. Selling it is cleaner still.

Vehicle registration and insurance.

A car with your old state’s plates is a bright little thread back to it.

Your final return.

This one matters more than people think. You need to file a final or part-year resident return showing the exact date you stopped being a resident. Skipping that can leave the whole question hanging.

None of these things is magic by itself.

But together, they paint a picture.

And the picture you want is simple: “I have built my life somewhere else.”

This is the part people hate because it feels unfair.

You can absolutely intend to move. You can emotionally feel gone. You can tell everybody you know that you now live in Colombia.

And legally, that may mean almost nothing if the paperwork still tells a different story.

States care about actions, not speeches.

You do not become a non-resident because you posted a palm tree on Instagram and captioned it “new chapter.”

You become a non-resident by taking what one state called “voluntary and positive action.”

That means you changed the license. Changed the registration. Changed the mail. Changed the filings. Built a new paper trail. Closed the old one.

That is what counts.

Let me be honest: I am not presenting myself to you as a perfect tax-residency monk who executed this flawlessly from day one.

I’m presenting myself as someone useful.

I left North Carolina. I live in Colombia. My companies are in Delaware. I’m only in the U.S. a few weeks a year. But I also kept some threads attached longer than I should have — a North Carolina driver’s license, a car with North Carolina plates, a bank account there.

And that is exactly how I ended up getting called for jury duty.

Because to the state, those things still said: “He’s one of ours.”

I got out of it because I had proof. Travel records. Passport stamps. Documentation showing I was out of the country nearly all year.

That’s the hidden lesson: the documentation saved me, not my opinion about where I live.

And if you’re going to live abroad, that distinction matters.

If your old state ever comes asking questions, you are not going to win that argument with charisma.

You’re going to win it with paperwork.

Keep the boring stuff.

Your visa or residency card abroad.

Your lease.

Utility bills.

Foreign bank activity.

Local health coverage.

Travel records.

Flight history.

Passport stamps.

What you are doing is not “hoping your state leaves you alone.”

What you are doing is building such a clean record of your new life that your old state has no interesting case left to make.

That is the goal.

A lot of people moving abroad assume mail is some secondary detail they’ll figure out later.

It isn’t.

Mail is one of the small, dumb things that keeps your old life legally alive.

If all your statements still go to your old state, you are leaving a breadcrumb trail that says “resident.”

The clean fix is usually a virtual mailbox in the right jurisdiction. These services can receive your mail, scan it, forward what matters, and give you an address that actually supports the story you are trying to tell.

Again, boring.

Also important.

Moving abroad does not automatically end your relationship with your old state.

That relationship has to be formally, carefully, and provably ended.

You need a new domicile.

You need the paperwork to match the life.

You need the old threads cut.

And you need enough records that if anyone asks questions later, the answer is obvious.

Because states do not care that you live in Medellín now.

They do not care that you’re “based in Colombia.”

They do not care that your soul has evolved.

They care what the documents say.

And if the documents still say “resident,” then congratulations: your old state still thinks you live in its basement.