Offshore Savings Accounts for Expatriates

You may well be wondering whether there is any point in opening an offshore savings account.  Perhaps you prefer to manage all your money onshore in your new nation of residence now that you’ve moved abroad, or maybe you still have everything going through the British system as that is what you know and trust.

However, when you move abroad and lose your tax residency status in the UK, you can potentially benefit substantially from even the simplest form of offshore savings account.  This is because your interest earned on such an account can be paid gross of tax, allowing you, depending on your circumstances and the nation in which you reside and are tax liable, to either legitimately avoid tax on your savings, or to defer the payment of taxation.

Even if you can ‘only’ defer payment of tax by having an offshore account, you can still benefit substantially – this is because you can defer it to the point at which perhaps your tax status is such that you pay reduced taxation, or else it allows a greater compounding effect to benefit your money.  In this report we’ll take a look at the offshore savings account options for expatriates – so that whether you have a great deal of wealth to save and a requirement for a complex solution, or you just want to drip feed an account and get a better interest rate offshore, we will show you your options.

An Introduction to Offshore Saving Solutions

Even the high street banks such as HSBC, Halifax and NatWest offer overseas clients the chance to have offshore savings and investment solutions.  This is because the world of offshore has changed dramatically in recent years.  No longer are you thought of as slightly dodgy if you save offshore – rather, if you’re an expatriate and you manage all your money onshore you’re thought of as slightly mad!  The offshore world doesn’t have to mean tax evasion and money laundering!  Nowadays, for expats, offshore means managing your money wisely!

As stated, even the simplest offshore savings accounts into which you pay a sum monthly or perhaps into which you have placed a lump sum, can benefit you in the form of taxation saved potentially, or taxation deferred.  On top of such a simple solution you have anything and everything available to you offshore from offshore high interest deposit bonds to which you commit your cash for a fixed term, to various currency savings accounts so you can play the FX game or hedge your currency bets, or even investment funds if you’re after a slightly higher risk solution for your wealth.

You can also choose to save offshore for your pension – and you can do so through a slightly more conventional offshore pension plan such as QROPS (qualifying recognised overseas pension schemes), or you can diversify as far as you want to with the aid of a financial adviser who will work with you to build a balanced and correctly aligned portfolio, aligned according to your needs, requirements and risk profile.

How to Start Saving Offshore

Because there are so many potential solutions available to you offshore, you need to know what you want to achieve from the utilisation of the options and alternatives available to you.  To that end you can either take the lazy person’s approach, (which is our personally preferred method, after all, we all have better things to do with our free time than stress about money), and work with a financial adviser, or you can do your own research into what’s available to suit you.

If you take the latter option you will need to spend some time actively thinking about what you want to achieve in the short, medium and long-term, where you will be in the short, medium and long-term, how your taxation status may change during that period, where you want to retire etc., as all of these considerations will affect the offshore savings methods and alternatives you choose.

OR

If you take our preferred method of approach to such things you will get your financial adviser to do all the hard work for you.  They will work with you through a complete fact find to find out all the relevant data and details about you, to learn who you are, what you want to achieve, what money you have where and what you can and should be allocating it to, and then, with this complete and well rounded understanding of you, they will work to personally design a savings solution for you.

It may well be that an adviser can present you with more than one solution to your offshore savings needs, it may well be that they suggest you diversify your savings and investments…but whatever they suggest, you can be sure that they will be basing their advice on what they have learned about you, in harmony with what they know about the products and solutions on the market at the current time.

And to make it even easier for you, you can .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you want us to recommend a well-established offshore financial advisory that specialises in assisting expatriates, and which is licensed to operate in your location.  Otherwise, you can take recommendations from friends or colleagues, but remember that the person you trust to give you financial advice needs to be qualified, experienced and reputable!