Question 1

What is a state residency audit and why should I worry about it?

Accepted Answer

A state residency audit is an examination by a state tax authority — typically your former state of residency and domicile — to determine whether you actually severed your connections to the state or whether you remain taxable by the state. The state's interest is straightforward: a resident usually pays state income tax on worldwide income, while a non-resident pays only on income sourced to that state. A domiciliary can pay tax on their entire wealth — including estate tax at death, capital gains regardless of source, and in some states, wealth-based assessments — whereas a non-domiciliary pays nothing on these. The financial gap between the two is often enormous for high-income individuals. The reason to take this seriously is that the burden of proof falls on you, not the state. A state can claim you remained a resident based on circumstantial evidence — a maintained driver's license, a vacation home, frequent visits to family — and you must prove otherwise. The dispute can cover multiple tax years, accumulate penalties and interest, and result in tax bills that run into six or seven figures. California, New York, and increasingly Washington pursue these audits aggressively. The audits are sophisticated, time-consuming, and often initiated years after the move when reconstructing your record is most difficult. Exodus Cleric exists because the difference between a successful residency claim and a failed one usually comes down to documentation — and that documentation must be built day by day, not assembled in panic when an audit notice arrives.

Question 2

What separates Exodus Cleric from other residency tracking apps?

Accepted Answer

Other applications in this category are day counters. They record where you are and produce a tally. Exodus Cleric does this as well, but the day count is the starting point, not the product. What separates Exodus Cleric is the analysis layer. Every state applies a different residency test. California uses a plurality standard that examines which state you spent the most days in, regardless of whether you crossed any specific threshold. New York combines a 183-day test with a place-of-abode analysis that considers whether you maintained a permanent home in the state. Florida and Texas have no income tax but operate as safe harbors only if your domicile is genuinely established there. Each state has different rules, different thresholds, and different evidentiary expectations. Exodus Cleric understands these rules and applies them to your specific transition. The product tells you not just where you have been, but what your record means under the rules that apply to you. It identifies the gaps that create liability. It monitors plurality status against the state you are leaving. It generates alerts when your position is approaching a meaningful threshold. The competition tracks days. Exodus Cleric tracks defensibility. A second difference: Exodus Cleric is built for the relationship between you and your tax advisor. The analysis outputs, advisor access tools, and documentation features are designed for a CPA or attorney to review and act on. Other tools produce data. Exodus Cleric produces a record your advisor can stand behind.

Question 3

When should I start tracking my residency transition?

Accepted Answer

The day you decide to make the change. Not the day you sign a lease in your new state. Not the day you transfer your driver's license. Not the day you file your first non-resident return. The reason is that residency audits look backward over multiple years and examine the entirety of your transition. An auditor reviewing your residency change in 2027 will want to understand your intent, your actions, and your day count starting from the moment your transition began. Records assembled contemporaneously — as the days happen — carry significantly more evidentiary weight than records reconstructed from memory, credit card statements, and calendar entries pulled together months or years later. If you have already moved and have not been tracking, start now and use Exodus Cleric's catch-up feature to fill in past days as accurately as you can. Imperfect records started late are still better than no records, and a year of contemporaneous logging strengthens an otherwise reconstructed record substantially. If you are planning a move that has not yet happened, begin tracking your current state days now. Establishing a baseline of where you spend time before the move provides important context for the change you are about to make. A useful guideline: if a residency audit is likely to be material to your financial position, the cost of starting your record early is trivial compared to the expense of fighting without a strong record. The stakes are high. Preparation is your only meaningful defense.

Question 4

How long should I keep my residency records?

Accepted Answer

The conservative answer is at least seven years from the date of the relevant tax filing. The more realistic answer for high-exposure individuals is longer. State tax authorities have varying statutes of limitations for residency audits. California typically allows four years from the filing date but extends to indefinite if no return was filed or if the state alleges fraud. New York generally allows three years but can extend to six in cases of substantial omission. Other states vary, and the limitations period restarts in certain circumstances such as filing an amended return. Beyond the statute of limitations, practical considerations argue for longer retention. Audits initiated in the final months of the limitations period can drag on for years. Appeals can extend the timeline further. If your residency change involved significant assets — sale of a primary residence, exercise of stock options, business sale proceeds — the relevant records may need to be defensible long after the standard retention period. Exodus Cleric retains your record for the duration of your subscription and for thirty days following cancellation. For permanent retention, the Executive tier includes a document repository designed for long-term storage. Regardless of which tier you use, we recommend exporting your annual record at year end and storing it independently — both as a backup and as a contemporaneous artifact you can produce if needed.

Question 5

What is a residency exam actually like?

Accepted Answer

A residency exam typically begins with a written notice from the state tax authority, often arriving one to three years after the tax year in question. The notice requests documentation supporting your residency claim and lists specific items the state wants to see — typically including a calendar of your days, supporting receipts, lease or property records, utility bills, vehicle registration, voter registration, professional and social affiliations, and credit card or bank statements. The state's examiner is looking for what attorneys call indicia of residency — the everyday markers that suggest where your life is actually centered. They will compare what you claim with what your records show. If your day count places you in your new state but your credit card statements show frequent travel back to your former state, your medical providers remain in your former state, your social club membership is in your former state, and your children attend school in your former state, the examiner will draw conclusions from that pattern. The exam can take six months to two years depending on complexity. The taxpayer typically responds in writing through their CPA or attorney. Document requests can be extensive. The examiner may request interviews. If the state determines you remained a resident, they will issue an assessment for back taxes, penalties, and interest — which you can accept, negotiate, or appeal. The states that pursue these audits most aggressively use different approaches. California focuses heavily on plurality — they want to see that your claimed new state has clearly more of your time and life than California does. New York focuses on the 183-day count combined with whether you maintained a permanent place of abode in the state. Washington, which recently introduced a domicile-based capital gains tax, is developing its enforcement playbook now and is increasingly looking at former residents who relocated to bypass the tax. The single best preparation for a residency exam is the contemporaneous record — the documentation built day by day as your transition unfolded. Records reconstructed after an audit notice arrives are usable but carry less weight. The cleric prepares before the examination, not during it.

Question 6

How is Exodus Cleric different from a spreadsheet or calendar?

Accepted Answer

A spreadsheet or calendar can record where you were on a given day. Exodus Cleric does this as well, but with three categories of advantage that compound over time. The first is the analysis layer. A spreadsheet shows you that you spent 142 days in California and 168 days in Georgia. Exodus Cleric tells you what that means under California's plurality test, where your safety margin sits, what gaps exist in your record, when you should be concerned, and what you should do about it. The interpretation is not optional in a residency strategy — it is the core of the strategy. The second is contemporaneous timestamping. An entry made in Exodus Cleric on a given day carries a server-side timestamp showing when the entry was created. A spreadsheet edited months later cannot demonstrate when each row was actually entered. In an audit context, contemporaneous records carry meaningfully more evidentiary weight than records assembled retrospectively. The third is corroboration. Exodus Cleric structures your record to incorporate supporting evidence — photos, receipts, location pins, document uploads — alongside each day. A spreadsheet treats your day count as a self-attestation. Exodus Cleric treats it as one element of a corroborated record. When an examiner asks how you know you were in Florida on a given Tuesday, having a structured response with multiple evidence types is materially different from having a spreadsheet cell. A spreadsheet can substitute for Exodus Cleric in the same way a rowboat can substitute for a cruise vessel. Both float. Only one is built for the rough waters ahead. The state revenue agency technology tools are powerful and robust. Shouldn't you have a powerful technology tool on your side too?

Question 7

Is my data secure and private?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Data security and privacy are central to how Exodus Cleric is built, and the architecture reflects that priority. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest using industry-standard encryption. Authentication uses secure tokens stored on your device's secure enclave. The application infrastructure uses commercial-grade cloud services with row-level security ensuring that your records are accessible only to you and to anyone you explicitly authorize through the advisor sharing portal. For users on the Foundation tier, your data stays within the Exodus Cleric system. No external AI processing occurs. Your documents and analysis are not sent to third-party AI services. This is by design — Foundation exists for users who want disciplined tracking without external data processing. Professional and Executive tiers include two distinct AI-assisted features: AI document review (the assistant reads supporting documents you upload to help organize them in your record) and an optional per-event calendar AI fallback (when calendar import is enabled, on-device parsing handles the standard case; for events the on-device parser cannot identify, you can opt in on a per-event basis to send that one event to our AI assistant for state identification). The per-event AI is always an explicit user action you take inside the calendar review screen — calendar data is not sent to AI by default. All AI processing uses the commercial Anthropic API with strict data handling protocols. Your data is processed for the specific analysis you request and is not used to train AI models. Anthropic's commercial API retention policy retains processing logs for seven days, after which they are deleted. The AI does not receive your email, full name, address, or financial figures alongside the content being analyzed. Account deletion is available at any time and removes your data across all systems within thirty days, in compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act and other applicable privacy regulations. Read our complete privacy policy for full details on data handling, retention, and your rights.

Question 8

Does Exodus Cleric replace my tax attorney or CPA?

Accepted Answer

No. Exodus Cleric is not a substitute for qualified tax counsel and is not designed to provide legal or tax advice. Your residency strategy, your specific tax positions, and any communication with state tax authorities should be handled by a qualified professional advisor who knows your full financial situation. What Exodus Cleric does is make your advisor's work more effective and less time-consuming. When your advisor reviews your residency position, they need a complete and reliable record of your days, your supporting documentation, and your analyzed status under applicable state rules. Without that record, they spend significant billable time reconstructing the basic facts before they can do the work that actually requires their judgment. With that record, they can focus on strategy. Think of Exodus Cleric the way you would think of a well-organized filing system for a complex tax matter. The filing system does not replace your accountant. It makes your accountant more effective. The advisor sharing portal in Professional and Executive tiers is built specifically to give your CPA or attorney clean access to your record without requiring them to learn a new system or wait for you to email them documents. If you do not currently have a tax advisor and you are contemplating a meaningful residency transition, finding one should be a higher priority than subscribing to Exodus Cleric. The product supports a professional relationship — it does not substitute for one.

Question 9

What happens if I'm audited?

Accepted Answer

If you receive a residency audit notice from a state tax authority, the first action is to contact your tax attorney or CPA. Do not respond to the audit notice directly without professional guidance. Your advisor will handle communication with the state on your behalf and will guide your responses through what is typically a multi-month or multi-year process. What Exodus Cleric provides at this point is the foundation of your defense. Your contemporaneous record of days, your supporting documentation, your analyzed plurality status, and the alerts and adjustments you made along the way constitute the core evidence of your residency claim. The advisor portal allows you to give your attorney secure read-only access to your complete record, which they can review and reference throughout the audit process. Exodus Cleric does not represent you in an audit and does not communicate with state tax authorities on your behalf. Those functions belong to your professional advisor. What we ensure is that when your advisor needs the underlying record, it exists, it is organized, and it is defensible.

Question 10

Can my CPA or attorney access my records?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Exodus Cleric includes an advisor sharing portal designed for exactly this purpose. You generate a secure, time-limited access link from your account. The link grants read-only access to your residency record — your day count, analysis, plurality status, gaps, alerts, and supporting documentation — without giving your advisor administrative control over your account. Your advisor does not need to create an Exodus Cleric account or learn the application. They simply open the link and review the record in a clean, organized interface designed for professional review. The link can be revoked at any time. You control which records are visible. You can generate separate links for different advisors if you work with both a CPA and a tax attorney. The portal is specifically designed to eliminate the friction of sharing residency records — no forwarded receipts, no emails with attachments, no shoebox of paper documents arriving before tax season.

Question 11

How does automatic GPS tracking work — and why does it capture more on some days than others?

Accepted Answer

When you stay in one place all day, tracking is simple. Exodus Cleric records three snapshots — at 8am, 6pm, and 11:55pm in your device's local time — confirming you were in the same state. That's all an auditor needs to see for a straightforward day, and it's all the app stores. Travel days are different, and travel is exactly where your record matters most. When the app detects that you have crossed into a new state, it stores an additional capture to mark the transition. Drive from Nevada to California for a meeting and back? You get five records: your three daily snapshots plus one when you entered California and one when you returned. That timeline of movement is precisely what a state tax authority wants to see for a day where you were on the road. If your phone is off during a flight — which is common — the app captures your location before you board and again when you land and power back on. You will see two records in different states with nothing in between. That is the signal to log a Travel Day: tap the TRAVEL tab, add your flight details (airline, flight number, departure and arrival times), and the itinerary fills in the story your phone could not capture mid-flight. The result is a record that is lean on static days and detailed on travel days — exactly the opposite of what a manual log tends to produce, where people remember to note interesting travel but forget to document the quiet days at home that are equally important to your plurality count.

Question 12

What is the difference between domicile and residency?

Accepted Answer

The terms are often used interchangeably but they are technically distinct, and the distinction matters in residency law. Domicile is your true, fixed, and permanent home — the place you intend to return to whenever you are away. You can have only one domicile at a time. Domicile is established through a combination of physical presence and intent to remain indefinitely. Changing your domicile requires both moving to a new place and demonstrating intent to make that new place your permanent home. Residency is a broader concept and varies by state. A state can claim you as a resident based on different criteria — number of days present in the state, maintenance of a permanent place of abode in the state, or other specific tests defined by state law. You can be a resident of a state without being domiciled there, and you can be domiciled in a state without being a resident under that state's specific tax definition. For most state tax purposes, what matters is the state's specific definition of resident — which often combines elements of domicile and physical presence. California's residency test, for example, examines whether you are domiciled in California or whether you are in California for other than a temporary or transitory purpose. New York looks at domicile and at the statutory residency test based on days and abode. The practical implication is that successfully changing your tax residency requires more than physical relocation. It requires changing your domicile — establishing your new state as your true permanent home — and being able to demonstrate that change with evidence. Exodus Cleric tracks the physical presence side of this equation. The intent and life-centering elements are documented through the supporting evidence you accumulate over time.

Question 13

Can I just be a nomad or split time across multiple states?

Accepted Answer

Both strategies sound appealing and both create more risk than they appear to. The nomad strategy — claiming residency nowhere or in a low-tax state while actually living everywhere — fails for most US persons because every state you spend meaningful time in can claim you as a resident or domicile under its own rules. If you spend 70 days in California, 60 days in New York, 80 days in Florida, and the rest of the year traveling internationally, both California and New York can argue against your residency change — California through its plurality test, New York through its domicile analysis. Your absence from any single state for most of the year does not establish residency elsewhere — it leaves you exposed in multiple states simultaneously. Compounding this, the absence of a clear domicile elsewhere makes it easier for your former state of residence to argue that you never actually left. If you sold your California home and now live in hotels and rentals across several states without establishing a true permanent home anywhere, California's position becomes that your domicile remained California by default. The burden of proving otherwise falls on you, and the absence of a destination domicile is hard to overcome. Splitting time across multiple states presents related challenges. If you genuinely live half the year in Texas and half in California, both states have meaningful residency claims against you. California's plurality test will evaluate whether you spent more days in California than any other state — and if Texas and California are roughly equal, the analysis becomes complex and disputable. The strategies that actually work involve establishing a clear primary domicile in your destination state and structuring your life to demonstrate that primacy — primary home, primary medical providers, primary professional and social affiliations, primary registered vehicles and voter registration, plus a day count that meaningfully favors the new state. If your situation genuinely involves significant time in multiple states, this is a conversation to have with your tax attorney before making the change. Exodus Cleric tracks all of your states accurately, which becomes more important — not less — when your situation is multi-jurisdictional.

Question 14

Where does the cost-of-living and tax data come from?

Accepted Answer

State-specific tax rules — income tax brackets, sales tax rates, property tax effective rates, payroll levies, transfer taxes, estate and inheritance treatment — are sourced from official state revenue department publications and statutes, reviewed annually by a CPA or attorney before each tax year goes live. Each rule in our reference tables carries a citation and an effective-tax-year stamp, and our cost calculator surfaces the data vintage on every line item. For market-rate inputs, Exodus Cleric pulls only from public-domain federal datasets. Fair Market Rent figures by metro and county come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Your current mortgage rate, current home value, and target housing budget are inputs you enter yourself rather than auto-populated defaults — this lets you reflect what your specific circumstances actually are (a 30-year refinance from 2021 is very different from a new mortgage at today's rates) and avoids the complications of redistributing third-party commercial real-estate datasets inside a paid product. Required attribution: Fair Market Rent data is provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This product is not endorsed by HUD. All cost-calculator outputs are illustrative estimates intended as a starting point for a conversation with your tax professional, not a tax calculation or a recommendation to relocate.

Question 15

What does the Preparedness grade actually measure?

Accepted Answer

Preparedness measures the completeness and internal consistency of the record you have built in the app. It is calculated from objective facts about your data: how many days of the year you have logged, how many gaps are open in your timeline, how consistently you have been logging recently, how much supporting documentation you have attached to your day entries, and how many of the domicile establishment factors (driver's license, voter registration, financial address changes, and so on) you have marked complete. The grade is a letter from A through F, with the underlying score visible alongside. What Preparedness does not measure is whether your record is sufficient to prove your residency position. That determination is reserved to your tax advisor and, ultimately, to the state revenue agency reviewing your case. A Preparedness grade of A means your record is complete and well-organized — it does not mean you are audit-ready, and the app intentionally avoids that language. The asymmetry matters: a wrongly-flagged gap is harmless because it prompts you to look; a wrongly-affirmed "you look solid" invites reliance that the app is not positioned to support. You should read your Preparedness grade as a quality check on the data you have entered, not as a verdict on your case. If the grade is high, your record is in good shape to share with your advisor. If the grade is low, there are specific gaps the app can name and that you can act on. In both cases, the app's view is structurally limited — it sees only what you have logged, while a state agency can compel records, interview third parties, and access data the app never had.

Question 16

What information does Exodus Cleric collect, and how is it used?

Accepted Answer

Exodus Cleric collects two categories of information, and they are kept structurally separate. The first category is your personal record — the day-by-day state log, your home and exit states, transition date, any addresses you enter, any documents you attach, your subscription details, and the calendar entries you choose to import. This data is stored under your account, encrypted at rest, accessible only to you, and used only to power the features you interact with. It is never shared with another user, never used to train an external model, and never sold. You can request a full export at any time, and you can delete your account, which removes all of this data permanently within 30 days. The second category, which is entirely optional and off by default, is de-identified usage data. This exists to do two things: improve the GPS suggestion engine (so the app gets better at proposing the correct state for a given day), and, once enough users have contributed, unlock anonymous peer benchmarks (so you can see how your record compares to others on the same kind of transition). When you turn this on in Settings under "Anonymous Insights," the app begins forwarding patterns about your behavior — never your identity, never your coordinates, never exact financial figures — to a separate data store that holds no link back to your account. The link itself is destroyed when you turn the toggle off, which is why prior contributions cannot be re-associated with you. Specifically, the data forwarded includes things like: which state you confirmed when the app suggested a different one, how many days passed between declaring your transition and updating your driver's license, the corridor of your move (e.g., California to Nevada), and your income band as a coarse range rather than an exact figure. The data is aggregated only after enough users share the same pattern that no one in the group can be individually identified, and we have a written public covenant not to attempt re-identification. The toggle and all of the data flow are independent of your subscription tier — Foundation users can contribute and benefit from the suggestion engine improvements just as Professional and Executive users can. If you do not want to participate, leave the toggle off. The app works identically without it.

Question 17

Can my CPA or attorney see my record without me handing them my phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Exodus Cleric provides an advisor sharing portal that generates a read-only, time-limited link you can send to your professional advisor. They open it in any browser — no app installation, no Exodus Cleric account on their side — and see a structured view of your residency analysis, day count by state, plurality status, and the documentation you have on file. You control what the link includes: at minimum it shows the residency record and analysis; you can also optionally include your attached documents and the notes you have written on individual day entries. The link expires after 14 days by default and can be revoked at any time from Settings. While it is active, the advisor's view is read-only — they cannot edit your record, log days on your behalf, or change any setting. Every time the link is opened, the access is logged. This design is intended for the standard CPA review and audit-preparation conversation, where your advisor needs to see the picture clearly without burning a meeting reconstructing it from screenshots. The advisor sharing portal is included in the Professional and Executive tiers.

Question 18

Does the background GPS tracking drain my battery or send my location to your servers?

Accepted Answer

Background GPS in Exodus Cleric is designed to be both useful and unobtrusive. When you enable "Always On" location access, the app schedules three location captures per day — at 8 a.m., 6 p.m., and 11:55 p.m. in your local time zone — and matches each captured point to the US state it falls in. The state assignment is what the app actually uses; we do not retain precise coordinates after the state is determined for the day. Because the polling is scheduled (not continuous tracking) and uses iOS's low-power location services, battery impact in our internal testing is a few percentage points per day on a typical modern iPhone. Captured states are reconciled into your day log according to a deterministic rule set: the state in which you spent midnight is the state credited for that calendar day, with specific handling for red-eye flights and airport layovers. This means GPS data corroborates your manual entries rather than replacing them — you still confirm each day yourself, and any disagreement between GPS and your confirmation is logged so the suggestion engine can learn from your correction. If your phone was off, or you were in international waters or airspace at the polling time, the day simply shows no GPS data — a known gap, not a penalty. Your location data is sent to our servers only insofar as it appears in your day log and any GPS suggestions the app surfaces to you. The raw coordinates are not stored server-side. If you turn off background location access in iOS Settings, the app continues to work — you simply log days manually.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Prepared Mind Wins the Audit.