EU couple moving to UK, joint accounts for us?

TheCrazyTravel

Hello everybody,

This post will be my presentation in this forum that I discovered a couple of days ago and have been of great help in my planification before moving to the UK.

I'm a Spanish guy and my girlfriend in Latvian. We have been traveling for the last year and a half backpacking and hitchhiking around Europe, Asia and Africa. We are planning to do a multi-year trip by bicycle around the World, but before than that we want to settle down for a few months -may be even a year- in England.

We are going to rent a shared room, work and buy all the camping and biking staff we need while we are in the UK.

Getting to the point, I am trying to figure it out how to manage our finances in the UK and the main idea is to open a joint account.

Anything I should know about taxes or problems that it could arise on us?

I have heard that banks are not very welcoming in the UK, so I don't know if it would be complicated to get a standar joint bank account with a couple of debit cards. And if it would be posible to get it with no fees.

After that, after getting a job, I could be interested in getting some good cashback VISA, but I guess that the credit building need something more than a few months. Right? Do I forget of this kind of things if I am staying less than one year?

Thanks,
Pablo

InsideInsurance

Who do you currently bank with in Spain? Is it a company like Santander or HSBC that have a UK presence? If it does then you may find they have an international moving team that can assist and set up accounts here for you.

If you dont then you are going to find things a little restrictive because of the Know Your Customer checks that banks must make on all customers. These require you to be able to prove your identity and address but if you are just renting a room you arent going to be getting utility or council bills in your name, wont have a british driving license etc which are the normal forms of proof.

HSBC do offer a "passport" account which is for those that are just in (or about to move here) that has a lower level of requirements but they charge a fee for the account and it is otherwise a basic account.

TheCrazyTravel

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Who do you currently bank with in Spain? Is it a company like Santander or HSBC that have a UK presence? If it does then you may find they have an international moving team that can assist and set up accounts here for you.

If you dont then you are going to find things a little restrictive because of the Know Your Customer checks that banks must make on all customers. These require you to be able to prove your identity and address but if you are just renting a room you arent going to be getting utility or council bills in your name, wont have a british driving license etc which are the normal forms of proof.

HSBC do offer a "passport" account which is for those that are just in (or about to move here) that has a lower level of requirements but they charge a fee for the account and it is otherwise a basic account.

I have 6 bank accounts in Spain, one of them is from Santander but I have almost never use it for anything, never put there any salary; so I guess that my chances with Santander are zero.

I know that Spaniards open accounts with Lloyds and Barclays, and sometimes they doesn't get asked any proof of address. But I don't know which kind of accounts they gets.

Even if I am just renting a room I can apply for the electoral roll, aren't I?

InsideInsurance

You can be added to the electrol roll but depending on when you apply it can take 5+ months for that to show on the CRA. Even on a good day you've got to budget for it taking 3 months.

Even if you are on the electrol roll it doesnt remove the KYC requirements of one piece of photo ID to prove your identity and one piece of ID to prove your address.

I'd be surprised if HSBC are the only ones offering something like their passport account but I know a lot of the people I know that are immigrants to the UK did start with them, including my wife.

If you've associates that have opened accounts already why not ask them what account type they got and what they used as the second piece of ID