Recently Emmigrated, where to save?

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Loui.Marshall wrote: »

Didn't have the money before I left the country, so no

A bit late now, but it's not having the money that counts, it's having the relationship.

You can open a current account with £1. The process involves various identity and address checks - once done the bank knows who you are and you start a banking relationship (with your £1). If you later come along and say that you want to change your address to somewhere abroad, they will often take that in their stride. They might also let you open new accounts since you have an existing relationship and they have done all the checks. Obviously not tax-rules-specific accounts like ISAs, but you might get access to standard savings accounts.

If you turn up and say 'I live in Foreign and I want to open an account', all the alarms start going off. It's just too much hassle to deal with you as a new customer that they have to do special due diligence on and can't sell a juicy mortgage or credit card to, so nobody can be bothered. Unless you have mega-money and they can sell you overpriced products (any product with 'wealth' in the title means 'probably expensive' in my book).

One option still open to you might be to buy bonds of some kind - eg US or UK government bonds (gilts), which I assume you can hold on paper somehow. The interest rate is pretty low, but the risk of the UK government going bankrupt is also low (and if it does we have other things to worry about). The only thing might be finding a brokerage service that can liquidate them rapidly and transfer the money somewhere you can access (if your Foreign bank account goes pop, how are you going to withdraw money? Do you need it via an ATM somehow, or do you have somewhere trustworthy that can receive a wire transfer?

If gilts aren't rewarding enough, other kinds of corporate bonds have higher returns but higher risks too. Addiitonally, if buying bonds themselves is a bit complicated you can also buy 'bond trackers' which are shares (ETFs) whose values aim to track (less volatile) bonds - the advantage of these is they sell on the London Stock Exchange, NYSE, etc - most banks internationally should be able to deal them, and if you buy and hold the fees might not be too bad.

If it's the kind of thing where you might need to leave the country fast (eg due to political unrest), I suppose having a float of USD notes or gold might be the thing to get you somewhere you can then orchestrate sale of bonds on a slightly less pressing timescale.

cashbackproblems

Agreed you should have opened the account before you left. I worked in Dubai a while back so can offer advice on what i did.

All my accounts were opened with my parents address in the UK as i used to live there, in Dubai i had an HSBC account and a UK HSBC account, both were on the same internet banking and allowed free transfers at a decent exchange rate, so i used to transfer once a month and invest monthly through a UK broker (accounts with HL which i had opened while in the UK). Also i had other UK accounts and just made transfers in, no banks asked me to close down given i wasn't in the UK and Barclays i even had an ISA, as i was only in Dubai for 2 years.

As above you already have an account here and need it immediately so no point investing it. Plus on 10k your not going to earn much on it anywhere.