I’m a German cruise ship worker who deregistered from Germany and currently lives and works at sea without a tax residency. My income is earned entirely abroad and I don’t maintain a home or permanent base in Germany.
I want to start investing through a broker, but like many here probably know, most brokers require a formal tax residency and proof of address.
My situation is this: I still have financial accounts that technically show my former German address, even though I no longer live there. Some brokers seem to accept this kind of documentation without actively verifying current residency.
I’m not asking how to bypass rules. I’m trying to understand real-world experience:
Has anyone invested while being effectively non-resident, using legacy address documentation?
Did this ever trigger questions from tax authorities through CRS or other reporting?
If so, what did that process look like?
I’m mainly trying to gauge practical risk and how others in similar “stateless” or seafaring situations handled investing while staying compliant.
Any firsthand experience would be greatly appreciated.
Not that I have any first-hand experience being “stateless” in terms of tax residency, and you shouldn’t take tax advice from a random person on the internet, but you can probably assume that the online-broker asks for your address aka country of residency precisely to meet its legal obligations towards that country. Such legal obligations include CRS, reporting capital gains/interests/dividend income etc. generated in your account, and possibly withholding taxes. So if you stopped filing taxes in Germany, and some broker still thinks you are a tax resident of Germany and reports your investment incomes to Germany, doesn’t it invite scrutiny from the tax authority?
If you don’t want to pay a tax advisor in Germany, have you talked to your countrymen in similar work situations on your ship / other ships that you meet at port?
If Germany taxes capital gains/interests/dividends, it might make sense to get tax residency in a country that doesn’t. Not all countries/jurisdictions require you to live there for 183 days per year to be a tax resident. Perhaps talk to your colleagues from other countries to see what they do.
I know it’s a bit of work, but the most clear cut way will be for you to obtain a tax residency in a country that does not require your feet on the ground, and also preferably has some super low CGT rate
Then you’re all set.
Oh, and when you do your research, you may want to discard the ‘tax haven’ countries as they would be of not much help in your scenario.
And account for countries where it is even going to be possible to trade the instruments you want to trade, since not all possibilities are available to all residencies.
One other thing to consider is some countries have nominally medium/high CGT, but balanced by a pretty short timeline to exemption, i.e. if you hold your assets for >1 year as an example you become exempt from the CGT.
