Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Overseas banks’ Category

We were sure that we had uploaded all of our documents back on April 14th, and in fact we had. What we hadn’t allowed for was that we’d scanned the passports as soon as they’d turned up years ago and in particular before we’d signed them. So June 9th, we got a request from the immigration people for ID documents with photos and signatures i.e. the signed passports. So the dreaded Further Consideration message appeared on the two citizenship applications.

We re-scanned the passports and uploaded them the same day for the two citizenship applications and my visa application and thought that had knocked us back somewhat. So, we were rather surprised to see the Approval of citizenship email from immigration yesterday. Only one of them thus far, but just under nine weeks from application is well before the mid-August date we’d been expecting.

It’s shaping up to be a busy month as Wendy’s British citizenship was approved at the start of June and she’s to go to her citizenship ceremony at the end of July. She’s not British until she goes to that as that’s the day they hand her the citizenship certificate which we can use to get her passport.

On other fronts, we’re working through our timeline with this edging into the period when we start sorting out the UK finances. Most people seem to get the urge to tidy up their UK finances by closing all/most of their UK bank accounts whilst we’re doing the opposite. For a start, chances are that you will still have some requirement for a UK bank account and you will have problems trying to open any after you leave. In principle, you could go with one but it’s always useful to have a backup. Our main ones will be HSBC and Nationwide which both let you retain your accounts after you’ve emigrated. In both cases, it’s useful to have both the current account and a savings account (not an ISA as you can’t pay into that after you leave). Lloyds and NatWest are also possible, but they may change you to their international account after you’ve left the UK. You’ll also want Wise which operates in Australia and can provide you with the Australian equivalent of a sort code and account number as well as the UK ones and let’s you transfer between pounds and Australian dollars fairly cheaply. Last, but not least, you’ll want a UK American Express card because having that at least six months before you leave will let you get an Australian one as soon as you turn up there and that’s the only Australian credit card you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at the start.

Next up should be the second son’s citizenship. We’d thought they would have turned up at the same time, but our eldest got his just before the immigration site shut down for its weekend maintenance so, all being well, the second son will get his during the coming week. I’m thinking that my visa might be approved during the week as we’d deliberately put all the applications in my account on the assumption that if the immigration person saw the others, they’d go ahead and approve them all.

I’ve started looking into the option of a Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF), the much more expensive Australian equivalent of a UK Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). And it is a lot more expensive: the £120/year that the SIPP costs will be more like A$4000 (£2000) a year for the SMSF. In fact, it’s so much more expensive and there are so many restrictions on transferring from the SIPP to the SMSF, that I’m going to need to do more complete calculations to see if it would be worth doing at all.

We’ve also continued to look at potential houses, though we definitely won’t be buying anything until I’ve got the visa and not until well into 2027 at the earliest anyway as there’s just too many things left to do on the timeline to move any earlier. Quite a nice range of houses fitting our criteria have come onto the market over the past few months. Surprisingly, some very strong candidates still haven’t sold after maybe four or five months.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

If you’re considering investing outside your own country whether it be in shares or in property you need to consider the interest rate in that country relative to your own and the echange rate with your own currency.

The two tend to be linked and can rarely be considered totally in isolation. If you consider relatively stable currencies then a higher interest rate will tend to make a currency more valuable and conversely a lower interest rate will tend to make it less so. I say “tend to” because it’s far from a direct link as exchange rates are notoriously fickle: if markets take a view that a currency is overvalued then it’ll go down regardless of how high the interest rates are raised in that country.

However, unless you’re into short term trading it’s largely trends in exchange and interest rates that are important rather than the value that either may have at a given time. In fact, the neither the interest rate nor the exchange rate at a given point really matters a great deal but what you do need to do is to keep an eye on the exchange rate which is, usually, the most important variable when you’re investing outside your own country.

This also affects how you should keep score. Say you’re in the UK and you’re investing in America. In that case you need to measure the performance of your portfolio in dollars, not pounds. To rate the performance in pounds is just going to create a false performance statistic as it’ll be affected by the ups and downs of sterling vs the dollar and those can be quite substantial: in the last 20 years the pound has ranged from around $1 to the pound to over $2 to the pound. Obviously you’ll still measure your bottom line performance in sterling in this case but the performance of the portfolio itself is best charted in dollars.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

By far the most popular post on our Whole Earth Guide is the one detailing how to go about opening a bank account in America.

The reason is simple really: if you run an online business then sooner or later you generally find yourself in need of an American bank account. Unfortunately, the increased security measures in place post 9/11 mean that it’s not quite so easy to open one these days unless, of course, you’re living in America and therefore a considerable number of websites have grown up with the specific aim of selling you the required information.

Our site doesn’t charge for that information and therefore is increasingly popular as it provides exactly the same information that other sites charge anything from $5 to $250 to provide.

However, we’re sorely tempted to start charging for it too given some of the emails we’ve received demanding additional information and wanting to know why it isn’t on the site yet. What we’ll likely do is to charge for the hand-holding level of information or at least offer it for sale as the information on the above page is quite sufficient to allow anyone to open an account in America.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000�� a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.