Hello, friends.

So today I thought we’d talk about money and my first few weeks living in England. Not even so much about spending but on like… literally how to access it and survive.

I still have full review pending, because there are some more things I want to check, but opening a Wise account has quietly been a life saver for some really weird reasons and not literally one of the reasons I intended it to be.

When Wise says it functions as a bank account, yes, it technically does, but a lot of things in England are picky about what kind of bank accounts you can connect to things so as far having a “British bank account” it’s a solid… sort of.

I went to set up my phone on my second day here and it was rejected as a method of payment, so I had to pay cash for the first month and will have to go back once I get a proper bank account sorted.

A fun thing about trying to set up a bank account is that you generally need proof of address. To rent an apartment, you need a bank account.

I love England.

Sigh.

One exception to this is Barclays bank actually has you enroll by downloading their app and verifies your address by having you do the application in your home and it uses the GPS on your phone to verify that you are actually there.

One not so fun thing about this app is that you have to have a UK Apple account to download it.

To switch the country on your Apple account, you have to have a zero balance of credits/gift cards and no subscriptions.

So of course I went to switch my account and found an ancient $25.00 credit on there and I do subscribe to Apple +.

I sighed and bought another set of international adapters to burn up my gift certificate, which I’ll pick up when I’m home at the end of May.

Then I cancelled Apple + and went to switch my account to the UK.

LOLz.

Despite cancelling Apple +, the subscription didn’t actually expire until the end of that billing period, which was three weeks after I cancelled it.

Not so useful for opening a bank account that evening.

That was a fun thing.

Another fun thing has been that my credit cards, that are optimized for travel, are both Visas and they have a really cool awful, dreadful, not thought out thing where when I try to buy something online in the UK, it triggers the Verified by Visa thing that sends me a text message. Only to my American phone number.

So my credit cards are fairly useless for online shopping unless I want to pop in my American SIM card and pay $10 to accept those text messages.

How on Earth is this traveler friendly?

Deliveroo? Nope. Trying to order Covid tests online? Nope.

My cards work fine at restaurants, grocery stores, and to use the public transit but online shopping is an intermittent nightmare of Verified by Visa no’s.

And this is why my Wise card has been completely worth it. What would life be without takeout?

More seriously, what would like be like without Covid tests and other actually important orders from online?

Seriously – it’s actually crazy how much several of my cards advertising being traveler friendly and how quickly I got stopped in my tracks because they are Visas.

Those are my fun American -> England $$$ for now.

Have you ever moved countries? What money things caught you by surprise?