Bottom line: If you are a U.S. citizen, unless you are very rich it is unlikely that you can (legally) open a bank account in another country. This is apparently true regardless of all the articles online which claim that it is straightforward to do while not providing any concrete details about how to do it.
[UPDATE: See this post for information about using wise.com to achieve some, but not all, of the goals of opening an offshore account.
Here’s why I was looking into this and what I’ve learned…
Given the massive economic, political, and cultural instability in the United States where my wife and I live, we recently decided to start looking into opening a foreign bank account and transferring some of our assets there, denoted in a currency other than U.S. dollars. We wanted to do this for two reasons:
- We think there is substantive risk of depression and hyper-inflation in the U.S. and we want some of our money held in a different currency to protect against this.
- We think there is substantive risk that events in the U.S. force us to leave the country without time to liquidate our assets first, potentially without access to any of our savings stored in U.S. financial institutions, and we wanted some money overseas for us to be able to live off of if this happens while we figure out next steps.
Now, as I noted above, if you do a web search about how U.S. citizens can open a foreign bank account, you will find all sorts of articles purporting to explain how to do it. However, none of them (that I could find) get into the specifics of how to do it. It appears that’s because if you aren’t rich, you can’t.
The primary roadblock to doing this is that the U.S. federal government’s anti-money-laundering rules are so stringent and arduous that most foreign banks are unwilling to deal with them unless the customer is depositing enough money to make it worth their while. For Swiss banks, for example, “enough money” means a couple million dollars.
If you have enough money to be able to establish residence in another country, then some countries will allow you to open a bank account there, but even then it can be complicated, because if you are also maintaining your residence in the U.S. (as opposed to relinquishing your U.S. citizenship), the aforementioned U.S. rules may still apply.
Numerous countries allow you to buy citizenship for prices ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most of them also have investment requirements, i.e., in addition to what you spend to become a citizen, you also probably need at least a couple hundred thousand dollars more to invest in the country to qualify for that citizenship.
All of this is to say that for upper-middle-class folks like my wife and me who have nearly all of our savings in our retirement accounts and whose only other large asset is our house, moving some of our money overseas is impossible to do legally unless we’re willing to move ourselves overseas at the same time.
It is not a great time to be an American.
P.S. If you know for a fact that I am wrong about this, i.e., you know of a foreign country which allows Americans to open bank accounts there without residency or multi-million-dollar minimum balances, please comment below or e-mail me. I would love to be proven wrong.
P.P.S. There are certainly other ways to move money overseas, some borderline legal (e.g., crypto exchanges), some probably illegal (e.g., having a friend who lives overseas open an account for you in their name). These all come with significant increased risk. My wife and I do not currently believe taking that risk is justified at this time, and if we did, I wouldn’t post about it on my blog. 😂
