Opening bank account overseas for a uk poker player

jonesMUFCforever

jamesd wrote: »

steveholt, would your interest at say 5% be more than about 5500 a year? Which implies 110k deposited on average. If it's less than that it'd be less than the personal allowance and you could register for gross interest. This applies to the total interest of all of the accounts, not just each individual account.

Assuming that the interest is more than that, take the interest and pay an accountant a few hundred Pounds to sort out the tax for you. It's not worth avoiding the interest when it'll pay the accounting bill for you and still leave you ahead.

Assuming that OP works as well as plays poker then the advice given is incorrect.
The interest on savings and annual salary would have to be less than £5500 to declare yourself a non tax payer.

jamesd

Ask your UK bank about US Dollar accounts. Many offer them, including big players like NatWest, though the interest rate available from them is tiny in Dollars.

If you converted to Pounds you'd be able to get about 2275 Pounds in interest in a year.

Easy answer: convert to Pounds, buy BlackRock UK Absolute Alpha fund via Hargreaves Lansdown, convert to Dollars again whenever, hope that the fund returns 15% or so in the year. They also have a currency excchange service that'll be worth using for this amount of money. I'm assuming that you're willing to take some risk of the value decreasing to get a higher return than with a savings account. The fund produces capital gains (or possibly losses) so you get to use your 9600 a year capital gains tax allowance to eliminate tax on any gain.

hohoho2

Found this thread really interesting - I too have (and hopefully will have in the future) regular poker winnings.

My understanding (and it's only an understanding right now!) is that I can withdraw to Neteller in $ and do a reasonably good conversion rate to £, I think it is 2.5% or 1.9% via the Neteller debit card (the card incurs £2 fee every withdrawal from a cash machine though).

Then I withdraw to a current account in UK, which in turn I will either spend or deposit into a high savings account.

From the tax aspect, I understand that it's tax-free (is this the only good thing we can say about our Goverment...?) but I am going to keep records such as account screenshots so that I can prove I'm not laundering money from overseas.

Cook_County

If you are trading foreign currency you may have a CGT liability on the $.