carnê-leão

04/06/26 @ibdegen.  Everyone's tax situation is different, so I can't give you individualized tax advice, and am not qualified to do so anyway.  I'm a retiree from the US like you are, though, and have been paying taxes in Brazil since 2018, and can share with you some insights and topics to discuss with your accountant.  If s/he is not receptive to a creative discussion, and perhaps to doing some research if the material is unfamiliar, consider talking to another accountant.  There are lots of ways to interpret the tax regulations, which are complicated and constantly changing.  So with those caveats, here goes:

1. I always start my annual discussion with my accountant by saying, "I want to pay everything I owe, but no more than what I owe."  In my view, that principle should always guide your accountant's work.
2. Even though Brazil and the United States don't have a tax treaty, they do practice reciprocity, and Brazilian law frowns on double taxation.  So if you're bringing funds into Brazil that have already been taxed in the US, including post-tax savings, you should be receiving significant consideration for that fact.  It's not exactly a deduction or an exemption in the US sense, but your Brazilian taxes should be substantially lower than your US taxes.
3. I always complete my US taxes first.  Then I give my Brazilian accountant my completed US return, my 1099s, my yearend investment statements, the monthly extracts from my Brazilian bank accounts, and the statements for any miscellaneous Brazilian income (minimal) that I may have received.
4. You should get deductions for payments to a health plan if you have one, for being a senior, and perhaps more depending on your individual situation.
5. Prior to moving to Brazil, I was making my living as an independent consultant, and was considering continuing that work living here.  Perhaps for that reason, my accountant classified me at the time as a "Profissional Liberal" rather than "Aposentado", and I didn't have to use Carnê Leão, and still don't.  I always file my Brazilian taxes well before the due date, and pay them in full at the same time.  I have never had a problem with the RF over this.  I don't know whether the same setup would be available to you, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.
6. My understanding of Carnê Leão is that it's only a way to pay estimated taxes, like the quarterly payments that you may be making in the US already, except that it's monthly.  If you're making monthly dollar transfers to your Brazilian account  through Remitly, i would talk to your accountant about the feasibility of using the average monthly values in Reais of your previous year's remittances as the basis for your monthly Carnê Leão payments this year, after reducing them to take into account the fact that you'd already paid US taxes on the funds.  That way, you should end up approximating your Brazilian taxes pretty closely, and not have to concern yourself with exchange rates at all. 

I hope that some or all of the above is helpful to you.  The Receita Federal only expects us to pay what we owe, but if we overpay they'll be happy to accept it, and getting it back later may be a problem.  So it's worth the effort to get it right upfront.

Thanks @abthree. I will share this info with my accountant. It's very helpful.

Good morning @ibdegen - for the sake of the carnê-leaõ calculations of income earned and taxes paid in the US I use this table:

https://www.gov.br/receitafederal/pt-br … /conversao

Thanks @thetravelfox. This is very helpful.