Learning, Sharing, and Teaching > Investor Alley

Non resident alien living in US wants to invest. Advice?

(1/2) > >>

eazyebeneezer:
My wife is a foreign national who works for a foreign government and has a diplomat visa. Though she's been in the US for ten years, she's considered a non resident alien. She saves a LOT of money at her job. Aside from a healthy 401k, she keeps everything in cash. I've been trying to convince her to set up a ROTH IRA and a taxable account to get some of that money working for her, and for our FI future. Finally she is seeing the logic in this and we logged onto Vanguard together the other day to setup an account. She was unable to open an account there due to being a non resident alien.

Have others been in this situation? Are there companies that do allow non resident aliens to invest? I read a few articles saying that it was technically possible, but wondering if my fellow Mustachians have experience with this and/or recommendations.

Financial.Velociraptor:
Try Interactive Brokers.   They probably have a presence in her home country that she could open and then fund with USD to trade US markets.  They are very international...

eazyebeneezer:
Thanks for the lead, Velociraptor. It's not the easiest site for a newbie investor to figure out, but I'll do some digging into it. She was hoping to get a Vanguard Lifestyle fund, just set a risk tolerance and let it go. This site looks to be more for experienced investors balancing their own portfolios. I'll see what I can find out.

Paul der Krake:
Vanguard is silly when it comes to foreign nationals. You can just say she's a resident alien (which she almost certainly is for tax purposes, just not immigration purposes), and open it anyway.

Or just go to any other broker like Fidelity or Schwab, they'll be happy to have her.

aspiringnomad:
I'm in this exact situation. I set my wife up with Schwab and highly recommend it. In my experience, Vanguard's customer service is generally not very good, but especially poor for non US citizens.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page