Two things keep showing up in relocation content online, and both of them are half right in a way that could cost someone real money if they build a plan on the half that's wrong. A third thing isn't a correction at all — it's just a piece of infrastructure most people don't find out about until their mail is already piling up in a house that isn't theirs anymore.

Myth: Moving Abroad Gets You Out of U.S. Taxes

A tax explainer reel making the rounds gets most of this right, which is rare enough to be worth noting. U.S. citizens are taxed on worldwide income no matter where they live — that part is accurate. The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion is real and the number is real: $130,000 for 2025 income filed in 2026, rising to $132,900 for 2026 income filed in 2027.

Where the confusion sets in is what the exclusion actually covers. It only applies to earned income — wages, salary, self-employment income for work performed abroad. Pensions, Social Security, dividends, rental income, and capital gains aren't touched by it. Someone living abroad on a pension and investment income isn't sheltered by FEIE at all, regardless of how low that income is.

State tax residency doesn't end automatically either. Some states — California, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina among them — will keep treating a former resident as a taxpayer based on ties that seem incidental: a mailing address, a driver's license, property left behind. Closing out state residency is its own checklist, separate from the federal filing.

Myth: Vanuatu Citizenship "Passes Down to Your Family Automatically"

The price quoted in circulating posts — $130,000 — is accurate. That's the correct minimum government contribution for a single applicant under Vanuatu's Development Support Program in 2026 (closer to $135,500 all-in once due diligence fees are included).

The claim that citizenship "passes down to future generations" automatically is where the marketing gets ahead of the legal reality. Nearly every site selling the program uses this exact language — hereditary, generational, a legacy asset. But the more careful legal sources describe something different: a child born in Vanuatu becomes a citizen automatically. Everyone else — including a citizen's own children born elsewhere — has to be added to the citizenship application and pay the applicable fee. It's not free inheritance across generations. It's an ongoing administrative step, repeated each generation, that the word "hereditary" glosses over.

That distinction matters for anyone treating a citizenship-by-investment program as a permanent, one-time family asset rather than a structure that needs revisiting with every new dependent.

Not a Myth — Just a Gap: Where Your Mail Goes

This one isn't correcting bad information. It's filling a gap that most relocation checklists leave out entirely. Once a U.S. address is closed, mail doesn't stop — it has nowhere to go. A U.S. virtual mailbox service like Traveling Mailbox (travelingmailbox.com) solves this cleanly: it provides a real U.S. address, incoming mail is opened, scanned, and delivered as a PDF, then securely shredded. It's one of the pieces of a proper U.S. administrative closeout that rarely makes it onto the checklist until it's already a problem.

The Bottom Line

None of this is a reason not to go. It's a reason not to build a plan on what a caption or a sales page said. A real number attached to a real program doesn't mean every claim built around that number is equally solid — the price and the fine print are two different facts, and both need verifying before a decision gets made on top of them.

Research current as of August 2026. As always, verify all details — FEIE thresholds, citizenship program terms, and state tax residency rules — with a licensed cross-border tax professional or immigration attorney before any financial or relocation decision.

If you don't know what else you don't know yet — that's what the free guide is for. 5 Questions to Ask Before You Relocate.