Banking While Cruising

[belizesailor]

[/QUOTE]
...
...NEVER tell any Visa representative that you are not currently living at your home country.

Robyn[/QUOTE]

Never tell any financial services rep or Gov't entity you are out of thier legal jurisdiction...makes them nervous.

This is why I keep a USA phone number, Fax number, and address...where am I? Why at home of course.

[Teknav]

...home...where the buffalo roam... <couldn't help it!> Mauritz

[AiniA]

We tell our bank to expect charges from certain countries at certain times since we are traveling, which we are. Just got a new VISA card that does have any ATM charges. Very expensive account unless you leave $5000 in the account. We have that there for emergencies. If VISA are jerking you around it might be time to tell them you will be switching to MasterCard and see what they say.

[Yofy]

Never tell any financial services rep or Gov't entity you are out of thier legal jurisdiction...makes them nervous.

This is why I keep a USA phone number, Fax number, and address...where am I? Why at home of course.

That's basically our philosophy.

Manny and I were talking about this whole issue last evening and his take on it is that the real problem was that we hadn't used our Visa card in a LONG time (like a couple of years). Visa simply didn't reissue our cards. When it was time to get new cards, they didn't send them. It took us a few months to con on to this as we have our mail forwarded only a few times a year. So by the time I called Visa our cards had been closed for some time.

It could have been that we hadn't used our credit card over a long period of time. Why that's a bad thing I don't know.

Of course it didn't help my saying that we were abroad. I learnt that lesson well. And definetly use your credit card every 6 months or so.

[Group9]

Originally Posted by Yofy

How did you get your card turned on again? We were told by the Visa rep that we'd have to fly to Cananda and reapply for a Visa card in person.

Thirty minutes of Iridium satphone charges while talking to Visa's security department was all it took to get it turned back on.

[Cheechako]

...
...NEVER tell any Visa representative that you are not currently living at your home country.

Robyn[/QUOTE]

Never tell any financial services rep or Gov't entity you are out of thier legal jurisdiction...makes them nervous.

This is why I keep a USA phone number, Fax number, and address...where am I? Why at home of course.[/QUOTE]
a big . But let them know you are merely "traveling" so they dont close your account for "suspicious activity"

[lorenzo b]

Go to an international bank, we use UBS, and let them handle your financial needs, including cards that never let you down or nickel and dime you. I never met an ATM that didn't smile and say thank you with my UBS card.

[belizesailor]

Interesting twist friends told me about in Panama recently...seems that Panamanian banks are closing accounts of USA citizens because they dont want to deal w increased reporting requirements.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by belizesailor

Interesting twist friends told me about in Panama recently...seems that Panamanian banks are closing accounts of USA citizens because they dont want to deal w increased reporting requirements.

And they want at least see intent to become a resident for opening new accounts. Basically, they don't want/need any funny business anymore. The higher interest rates tend to attract that.

[FlyMeAway]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

And they want at least see intent to become a resident for opening new accounts. Basically, they don't want/need any funny business anymore. The higher interest rates tend to attract that.

The reporting requirements and "funny business" have little to do with higher interest rates. The way Panamanian securities and banking laws work, you used be able to get complete anonymity in stock trading. It's an open secret that Panama is one of a very short list of places to bank if you want to engage in insider trading and have a good chance of getting away with it. Tax evasion is a related problem (in the sense that Panama has no capital gains taxes so you can keep your insider profits free from the IRS), but for straight-up tax avoidance strategies there are better places for that than Panama.

These quasi-sleezy-lawyers have a pretty good rundown of the "advantages" of trading from Panama: Panama Stock Brokerage Accounts

[Evenstar]

We met up with some people traveling that clued us in about the BoA/Scotiabank partnership which works nicely in the Caribbean. Basically with a BoA ATM card you can use Scotiabank ATM's like they were your own - no external ATM fees and no international bank fees/currency fees.

We learned though too late, we were out of the states. We tried to open a Scotiabank account in St. Martin but were not allowed since we weren't residents. So I went back to BoA - whom I've been trying to extricate myself from for years - and opened an eBanking account which is free so long as you don't ever use a teller (not a problem for us on the boat). So that is now set up and working and I can pull out 1,500 XCD's (or the local max equivalent) every day if I needed to so long as we are someplace with a SB branch.

CapitalOne Cash Rewards World MasterCard is what we use for any credit purchases, as it is 1.5% cash back, also with no foreign transaction fees which is like another 3%. From my conversations with BoA I learned they have a Travel Rewards Visa that basically behaves the same way, so I converted my BoA MC to one of those too.