By JOHN D. MCKINNON And LAURA SAUNDERS

WASHINGTON—The Treasury Department and the governments of five European nations reached broad agreement Wednesday on a proposal to prevent U.S. taxpayers from dodging taxes through foreign accounts.

WSJ’s John McKinnon stops by Mean Street with an interesting detail in the Senate’s proposed highway bill: it would be funded in part through taxes on IRAs and retirement accounts. Photo: AP.

At the same time, the Treasury and the IRS also released proposed regulations to implement a 2010 U.S. law known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which requires foreign financial institutions to report detailed information about U.S. account holders to the IRS and possibly withhold taxes on individual accounts.

If firms don’t comply, they could face U.S. tax penalties. An agreement among the U.S. and the other countries could help streamline implementation of the law.

The Treasury aims to make the regulations final by this summer.

France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. expressed support for the Treasury Department’s proposal, while other nations will be given a chance to evaluate the proposal and join in.

Washington for the past three years has been aggressively pursuing foreign accounts to make sure people aren’t using them to dodge U.S. taxes.

In a landmark 2009 settlement, Swiss bank UBS AG agreed to turn over to the U.S. the names of more than 4,000 U.S. taxpayers with secret accounts.

The IRS has since rolled out two programs allowing U.S. taxpayers who step forward to, in many cases, pay large penalties but avoid prosecution. At least 33,000 have taken the deal.

The 2010 law, known as Fatca, targets foreign banks to make sure U.S. taxpayers are paying the IRS what they owe.

The Treasury said various provisions of the regulations would be phased in from 2013 to 2017, to allow banks to develop appropriate systems and ensure they don’t violate local rules.

A Treasury official said several specifics of the new regulations would ease potential administrative burdens while still achieving the law’s purposes. For example, the proposed regulations allow foreign banks to rely on data they already collect to comply with anti-money-laundering rules, the Treasury said.

The announcement also appeared to embrace a recommendation by U.K. financial institutions for reduced information-gathering requirements on investment accounts that aren’t marketed to U.S. investors.

David Miller, a partner with Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP, said the proposed regulations are less burdensome than they could have been and satisfy the objective of ensuring “that U.S. taxpayers with foreign accounts pay what they owe.”

European banks for months had raised concerns that the U.S. law, as originally passed, might conflict with European privacy laws by requiring banks to enter into information-sharing agreements directly with the IRS. They initially reacted with favor to the new proposals.

Wednesday’s announcement included a joint statement from the U.S., Germany, France, U.K., Italy and Spain expressing intent to adopt a “common approach” to implementing the new law. That could allow banks to report U.S. account-holder information to their own governments rather than the IRS, solving many of the potential legal problems, European financial institutions said.

“I think this is a very positive approach,” said Peter De Proft, director general of the European Fund and Asset Management Association in Brussels. “We were very worried with the original approach and the burden it would bring.”

Countries such as Canada, Japan, Australia and China will be able to evaluate the proposed regulations and join in the negotiations with the U.S., said Phil West, a former international-tax counsel for the Treasury who is now at Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington.

As the network of participating countries grows, “it may be that ‘bank-secrecy’ jurisdictions feel increasing pressure to move toward a growing international consensus on information exchange,” Mr. West added.

U.S. financial institutions, which also had worried about the potential burden of the new rules, had mixed reactions to Wednesday’s announcement. Some expressed relief U.S. officials appeared to accept a number of their suggestions for reducing the potential negative effects on them. But others warned the new system still could lead some foreign banks to reduce their investments in the U.S., to minimize their exposure to U.S. tax penalties.

“Implementation of [the new rules] will impose significant challenges and costs for many United States financial services firms and their customers,” the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a Wall Street trade group, said in a statement.

While the Treasury is still implementing the law for financial institutions, individuals already are feeling the impact. U.S. taxpayers holding foreign financial accounts above a threshold as low as $50,000 will have to file Form 8938 disclosing the accounts with their 2011 tax returns or risk financial penalties. These thresholds are different from those for the annual Foreign Bank Account Report form, which is due separately to the U.S. Treasury by June 30.

Write to John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com and Laura Saunders at laura.saunders@wsj.com

By TODDI GUTNER

Q. I was laid off six months ago. I am basically still an entry-level employee even though I got a bachelor’s in 2005 and a master’s in 2007, both in economics from Ivy League institutions. Then I took a job at an investment company that I viewed as a stepping stone. After a few months, the company and I came to the mutual agreement things weren’t working out. I feel like I’ve used every strategy: networking, cold calls, recruiters, company Web sites and direct emails. After a bunch of phone and in-person interviews, I always get the same reaction: “You have a great educational background, but don’t have the experience we want.” How do I get over this hurdle, especially in an economy where people with double the experience will take a lower-level job?

A. You’ve clearly done a great deal to land yourself a new job, says Sheryl Spanier, a career coach. If you’ve gotten interviews based on your resume, this means that your background at least met some set of criteria employers were seeking. Otherwise they wouldn’t have reached out to you, she says.

Getty Images

Take a hard look at your interviewing skills. Your failure to move past the initial interview stage likely has something to do with the way you carry yourself during the meetings, says Ms. Spanier. “It might be about how you present yourself or the attitudes or opinions you express,” she explains. If this is the case, you’ll want to try and figure out what you need to improve. Practice your interviewing skills — what you say and how you say things — with a friend or mentor and get feedback, she suggests. Hone the “story” you’re telling and try to determine if it is helping you be considered as a viable and committed candidate.

Meanwhile, look for different and creative ways to build your experience and increase your odds of qualifying for more positions. “Volunteering with an organization where you can apply your skills is a great way to accomplish two key aspects of career development,” says John Heins, senior vice president and chief human-resources officer at Spherion Corp., a staffing firm.

Volunteering can help you keep your momentum going, as well as explain gaps in your employment. It can also help you to expand your professional network, as you may be working alongside someone who could be in a position to recognize your talent and drive, says Mr. Heins.

Similarly, you might consider pursuing project work or an internship for six months at a company that interests you, says Ms. Spanier. “You can gain the experience and exposure and [the company] will appreciate your contributions.” In this market, it’s all about trying to showcase your skills and internships are one way to do that, she says.

Write to Ms. Gutner at cjeditor@dowjones.com. If you have a question for the careers columnists, be sure to put Career Q&A in your subject line.

By KATE BOLICK

My father is a small-town lawyer of the old-fashioned variety, by which I mean that he cares about his clients the way a pastor does his flock. Most days he gets up from his desk at noon and strolls the seven or so minutes downtown to Angie’s Diner—that’s four minutes for travel, three for all the helloing and how’re-the-kids-doing that transpires whenever he goes from point A to point B in the Mayberry-esque town of Newburyport, Mass.

When he learned that a newly divorced friend and client, Norma (not her real name), was looking to buy a house, he drafted a memo for her weighing the pros and cons. He understood that she wanted to launch her new life free of ghosts and to establish a secure foothold in the world, but he wasn’t convinced that homeownership was the way to do it. He sent a copy to me, his unmarried, apartment-renting daughter, in case I ever found my thoughts traveling in a similar direction.

Single women have been buying homes like never before—a development that my father has seen firsthand, given that his bread and butter is real estate. In 1981, six years after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for lenders to discriminate according to sex or marital status, single women represented 11% of all homebuyers. That figure reached a peak of 22% in 2006, although it has dropped a few percentage points since then, due to the economy. Meanwhile, single male homebuyers have held steady around 10%. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, over a three-year period in the early 2000s the value of single women’s home purchases added up to more than $550 billion.

Alex Nabaum

Unmarried homebuyers are often making a poor investment decision, partly to feel more ‘settled.’

Such a trend would seem the very image of female empowerment: a single woman buying a home of her own. Whether a middle-age divorcee or a professional in her 30s who has bypassed the marriage-and-baby track—for now, at least—she’s seizing control of her life through real estate. In his eye-opening new book, “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” Eric Klinenberg interviewed quite a few of these women and found that, “Buying a home has become a powerful way to pivot from one life stage into another. It’s a signal, to themselves and those who know them, that they are ready to invest in themselves.”

This all sounds liberating, but is it really? That so many single women are proud to invest in themselves, and have the means to do so, is obviously an encouraging development. But I’m skeptical of the idea of anyone buying a home to “signal” his or her arrival. Homeownership, like marriage, is so encrusted with cultural projections and unquestioned assumptions that surely at least some of these women who have figured out that they should marry later (if at all) are unwittingly transferring a desire to feel “settled” or to be considered “grown up” into buying a house because “it’s time”—which is to say, swapping out one piece of conventional wisdom for another.

Just as the “marriage crisis”—the fact that we are marrying later and less—has given us the opportunity to rethink traditional marriage as society’s highest ideal, the housing crisis is our chance to reconsider the centrality of homeownership to the national psyche. Buying a home still works for many people, but it should no longer be taken as the embodiment of the American dream.

As Mr. Klinenberg sees it, the rise of solo dwellers represents the biggest demographic shift since the baby boom. For the first time in centuries, the majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried adults, at 51%. The subjects of his seven-year study are the 31 million of these single people who live by themselves—that’s roughly one out of every seven adults—comprising 28% of all households, even more than the nuclear family.

In small towns like Newburyport, these ranks are filled mostly by those like Norma—the divorced or widowed. Most young adults (ages 18-34) who live alone gravitate toward urban centers like Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and they are the fastest-growing group, with five million people today as compared with 500,000 in 1950. In this age cohort, women are outpacing men in both education and income, across the racial spectrum.

Buying a home makes great economic sense for some of these singles, male or female, but not for all of them. In his memo to Norma, here’s how my father breaks down the balance sheet: Buying offers “the ineffable qualities of ownership”—that is, presumed emotional rewards—but at the cost of immobility, lost investment returns and continuing expenses (taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance), which, for a $300,000 house in Newburyport, add up to $18,000 a year, or $1,500 a month. That is for a single-family residence bought for cash. Condos, in his opinion, are merely “buying into trouble; just one difficult owner can be a costly misery” (though he concedes that large complexes with professional management have much less potential for problems).

Renting, by contrast, offers more pros than cons: greater mobility, no continuing costs, no maintenance responsibilities and investment returns on money not spent on ownership—which, in Norma’s case at least, could likely cover her rent. He cites the downsides as “no ineffable qualities of homeownership” and “other tenants.” (The mortgage tax deduction gives a slight break to homeowners, but not so much as to make a real difference, and generally only those with high incomes itemize their deductions anyhow.)

Last I heard, Norma was resolute in wanting to buy—and, despite meddlesome and unsolicited Bolick opinions, this may be the right decision for her. But it’s hard not to wonder if those “ineffable qualities of homeownership” aren’t clouding her judgment, at least a little, the way that society’s dictate of marriage so often distorts our experience of relationships, pressuring many of us to marry because we “should,” even when we shouldn’t. As my father’s daily routine suggests, even a small town’s sidewalk culture can be a rich source of belonging and community.

What most of us look for in a home—a sense of security, safety and comfort—can be found without making such a major and complicated financial investment, one that, as the housing crisis has proved, can too easily end in calamity.

—Ms. Bolick is a contributing editor at the Atlantic and culture editor of Veranda. She is the author of the forthcoming book “Among the Suitors: Single Women I Have Loved.”