Advice re leaving money in UK

[Guest sunnydays]

Hi

 

We want to open up a UK savings account before we move to Adelaide but I have noticed that they all say for UK residents only?? & the internet access only accounts also state you should not try to access them from abroad?? What has everyones experience of this been?? We have accounts at the moment with our bank and we plan to keep two accounts open but we want a decent interest rate for our savings until the exchange rate picks up so want to open up new savings account.

 

Thanks!

[Guest teresa]

Hi

we are doing the same, so will be interested on what you find out. We will open uk account with online access in UK before we leave, then use forwarding address. Just have to make sure that you have online access. We are using NAB for our accounts in OZ, with this we get free transfers with moneycorp which we will use as a 'holding' account to transfer from UK acc to Oz.

[waynecaz]

We are also leaving our money in our savings account . I have give the bank my mums address but also took my mum into the bank to sign some papers so she can access all our accounts if we need her too !!

[Diane]

Have you had a look at interest rates over here in Australia? I know the exchange rate is not wonderful but it may be worth doing a bit of calculation to see if the higher rates out here would make it more worthwhile to move your money into a term deposit in Australia rather than leave it in the UK.

 

Sorry I know it doesn't answer your original question, but last I heard interest rates in the UK were something like 0.5% compared to around 6% here (roughly - I haven't checked recently)

[ajford]

We just opened a saving account with nab, to put the remainder of the money we have left from coming over the interest rate was 5 percent.

 

Lisa

[Guest mlissiman]

We left our First Direct account open in England 3 years ago and have had no problems. First Direct even send our statements, junk mail etc here. We can access the account online no problem. They even gave us separate passwords to use from within Australia if we needed to contact them by phone.