Foreign Perspectives

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).