USD Account

[Gentle_Chief]

Today I walked into a HSBC branch in North Sydney and was told that opening a USD account is a waste of time for an Aussie property investor who is planning on US purchases.

This is for both a Personal Account or as a Business account as the accounts are Australian accounts denominated in USD. So it would not matter if I opened a US $ account. I could as well give my AUD Westpac account itseems....

Totally confused now.... any help people!?

 

[ramblin]

Based on my own personal experience the advice sounds correct.

I needed a bank account for a business I had. The business was an Australian business, doing physical business in the US and therefore I needed a merchant account in USD to process US customer credit cards. The balance was all USD and I would have to make settlements into my AUD account at a $35.00 fee each time.

I rang around a lot of banks and was told NAB was the only bank that offered a genuine USD account. It cost me about $1200 to set up. I'm not sure if they still offer it. That was about 5 years ago. NAB were a nightmare to deal with to be honest but they were the only bank who offered what I needed.

Lu

 

[handyandy]

Today I walked into a HSBC branch in North Sydney and was told that opening a USD account is a waste of time for an Aussie property investor who is planning on US purchases.

This is for both a Personal Account or as a Business account as the accounts are Australian accounts denominated in USD. So it would not matter if I opened a US $ account. I could as well give my AUD Westpac account it seems....

Totally confused now.... any help people!?

Hi Chief

If you are going to be serious about buying in the US then you should travel there to get a real feel for what you are letting yourself in for.

As such, when over in the states it's a very easy matter to open a personal account. The process is similar to Aus with passport as proof of ID etc. Don't take a whole lot of cash as the banks FX is woeful for cash. Having established your account in this way you can then just transfer money to the account through something like OZForex.

If you establish LLC's prior to your travels then you will need all the LLC documentation along with you personal ID to open the account (s).

You can do this remotely by using an Attorney or possibly with the help of one of the many buyers agents that are offering this service. They seem to charge about $200 for this service.

They can offer this service because they have a relationship with one or another bank staff to accept the paper work through them. So really not an involved service but none the less a valuable service if you have no other way of achieving the same.

We originally established a personal account on our first visit and then established our first LLC account on our next visit but have since established 3 other accounts by simply phoning our 'personal' banker who then processed the application via email.

The trick is to get the first one.

Cheers

PS Forgot to mention that you can use Google voice available through Gmail to phone fixed lines or mobiles for free. To date, I have spent hours on the phone to the US - zero cost