So I’ve written several times about how studying abroad can save you money. Also, if you haven’t guessed by the entire nomadic style of my life, I’m a huge supporter of the idea of experiencing other cultures and doing new things that scare you – like moving to a foreign country for a little while.

England might seem like it’s not too different from the United States, and in the grand scheme of the entire world, it’s probably not, but if you plan to head across the pond for an extended period of time, you’ll encounter a lot of new challenges and not the least of which will be trying to remember to ask for a pint instead of a beer or adapting to their truly abysmal food standards (other than the chocolate and the puddings – oh my goodness, how I miss treacle tarts).

Money was seriously my biggest struggle. Not how to obtain it in the first place (I mean, yes, that’s a struggle for every student), but how to get it from Point A to Point B when Point A was a little bank in New Jersey, U.S.A. and Point B was the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England.

If you’re an American trying to get a British student visa, you need to prove that you have all your tuition and living expenses for a year in a bank account already when you apply for that visa.

So, on the one hand, you’ve certainly figured out all your funding before you get into the country, but on the other hand, you now have to figure out how to get that funding from one bank to another and, as of 2010, there was no particularly easy way to do it. I had to make a meeting and, in person, request the transfer from my American bank, which was fine when I was in America, but if I needed a transfer done any other time, that was useless.

At the time, I had so much trouble with Wells Fargo that I vowed to close my account with them the second I moved back to America. There’s nothing quite so terrifying as living alone in a foreign country and wondering if your money will get to where it needs to because your bank is totally useless.

I had the brilliant idea in England to open my account there with HSBC, because I figured they had branches in America, so they must be able to work together, right? Well… if I’d had an HSBC account in America, possibly, but I didn’t. Additionally, HSBC did have some options to streamline foreign money transfers, but they were for accounts with huge balances or massive monthly fees.

No thanks, folks, I wasn’t any international mogul, just a confused, broke postgrad taught student trying to get her M.A. in theater and performance studies.

The height of the stress occurred when I took out a Sallie Mae loan in March to cover the few thousand dollars I was going to be short before finishing up. It took me about 30 minutes online, if that, for Sallie Mae to fork over $3,500 to me. It took me two weeks, 8,000 emails and insane desperately pleading on my behalf and my parents to my bank in New Jersey to help me get that money into pounds and into my British bank account.

To make matters even better, I repeated all this insanity in reverse when I moved back to America. At least then I had a much lower balance and actually solved that problem in the extremely high tech way of cashing out my account and then getting the currency exchanged at the airport – which no doubt ripped me the heck off in exchange rates, but at least avoided all those headaches.

If only I’d known back then that there are actually money transfer companies that specialize in exactly this – whether you are an international mogul or just a broke and trying-not-to-starve college student. As a matter of fact, some companies even specialize in helping students figure out the madness that is paying student fees internationally.

 Have you ever considered studying internationally? Did all the red tape make you want to give up before you even started?