Leaving
What to keep copies of after a stay ends, and for how long
A period abroad generates documents that become relevant years later, at a border, a tax enquiry or a pension claim, and almost none of them can be reobtained afterwards.
By Tomas Bergqvist3 min read
The file you will want in ten years
Most of the paperwork generated by living abroad feels disposable at the time. It is administrative, it relates to a chapter that is closing, and the instinct at the end of a stay is to throw it out along with the furniture. That instinct is wrong, and the reasons emerge slowly.
Permissions, registrations, tax filings, employment records and evidence of where you lived all have a way of being requested long afterwards — by another country assessing an application, by a tax authority, by a pension institution, or by a bank asking about the source of funds.
The cost of keeping them is a folder and an hour of scanning. The cost of not keeping them is trying to obtain a document from an institution in a country you left, in a language you have half forgotten, with no local address and no way to prove who you are.
What is worth keeping
The core set is fairly consistent. Every permission or residence document you held, including expired ones. Every registration and deregistration confirmation. Tax returns and any assessment or correspondence. Employment contracts, payslips and any letter confirming dates of employment.
Then the evidence of where you lived: tenancy agreements, utility bills, the deposit correspondence. These are what establish a chronology, and chronology is exactly what future applications tend to want.
Add the health and social security records — the identifying numbers you were issued, any annual statements, and the contact details of the institutions involved. And keep your travel record, since dates of entry and exit are frequently relevant and impossible to reconstruct later. Old passports belong in this category as well, because the stamps in them are sometimes the only physical evidence of a movement that a later application asks about.
Digital, physical and the problem of formats
Scan everything and keep the originals of anything that would be hard to replace. Store the digital set in more than one place, because a single laptop is not an archive, and keep it in a format that will still open in a decade — plain images and standard document formats rather than anything proprietary.
Name the files so that somebody who is not you could navigate them, since the somebody who is not you may well be you in twelve years with no memory of the filing system. Country, year, institution, type is usually enough.
Tell one other person where the archive is. This is not morbid; it is the same reason you would tell somebody where important papers are kept at home, and a life spread across two or three countries makes the papers harder for anybody else to find.
How long is long enough
Retention periods for tax and official records are set by law and differ by country, sometimes substantially, so the specific answer has to come from the official source for the countries involved. The general position is that these periods are longer than people assume and that the cost of exceeding them is negligible.
For anything relating to immigration status, the sensible answer is indefinitely. Applications for longer-term status or for citizenship, in that country or another, routinely ask for a complete history, and a gap you cannot document is a genuine obstacle.
Pension and social security records also belong in the permanent category, since the moment they matter may be decades away and the institutions concerned will not be looking for you.
Keeping a route back to yourself
Alongside the documents, keep the means of being contacted and of contacting. An email address that will not lapse. The details of the institutions that hold anything of yours. Somebody in the country who knows how to reach you.
It is also worth writing a short summary while the memory is fresh: the dates, the addresses, the employers, the reference numbers, the names of the offices you dealt with. One page, written in the month you leave, saves an enormous amount of reconstruction later.
None of this is exciting and all of it is cheap. The archive is the residue of the stay in administrative form, and unlike the furniture, it does not cost anything to bring with you. It is also the only part of a stay that becomes more valuable the longer ago it happened, which is an odd property for a folder of receipts to have.
Common questions
How long should I keep tax records from another country?
Retention and enquiry periods are set nationally and vary, so check the official position for that country. As a general habit, keeping them substantially longer than the minimum is sensible, since storage costs nothing and reobtaining them is often impossible.
Do I need to keep expired residence documents?
Yes, indefinitely. Later applications for status or citizenship, in that country or elsewhere, commonly ask for a full immigration history, and an expired card or letter is frequently the only evidence of a period you spent somewhere.
Is a photograph on a phone good enough?
As a backup it is better than nothing and as an archive it is fragile, since phones are lost and replaced. Scan properly, store in at least two places including one that is not a device you carry, and keep the originals of anything hard to replace.
Features writer, Globetrotter Talks
Tomas writes the explanatory pieces on arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad and prefers a plain explanation to a clever one.
