Please note that I really like this card and so there is an affiliate link included in this post. If you join using the link, you get your first transfer fee free up to 600 USD and I would get a small fee.   

As I prepped to move to the UK, one of my biggest concerns was the best way to access money. I feel like the US lets you pay a lot more bills via credit card than the UK does and I didn’t want to get stuck.

Opening a bank account in the UK can be a bit of a hassle. If you’re a full time student, you can usually obtain a letter from your school (once you’re there in person) and between that and your visa, you can open an account.

Fun thing though, over the last 10 years, the UK has advanced a bit with their banking apps and several were like – just download our app and when you try to register your address, it will confirm it’s your address via GPS since it will know you’re there.

Well. Friends. If you have an American phone with a UK SIM card you may find you can’t download UK apps because you still have an American Apple account. To switch your country, you must have a $0.00 gift card balance and no current subscriptions.

So when I hit this barrier in attempting to download a bank app to register for an account, I had to spend a $25.00 gift card and cancel my Apple+ subscription. But, to make this even better, it doesn’t cancel as of that day – it cancels at the end of the subscription cycle. So I had 3 weeks before I could switch my Apple account country.

Not useful if you need a bank account immediately.

Now, I could’ve circumvented that by going to some banks with my apartment leas, but as you may be aware, I rented at an AirBnB for seven weeks so I could find an apartment. Needless to say, I had nothing that counted as proof of address, despite needing a bank account to pay for a deposit on an apartment and set up utilities.

All around awesome.

However, my Wise card kind of saved the day.

Let’s talk a bit about what a Wise card is. Essentially, it’s an American bank account and a wide variety of international bank accounts and by opening a Wise account, you get access to them.

So since I’m American, when I opened the account, it defaulted to an American bank account. I connected this account to my checking account and my PayPal account.

Then I selected to add a British bank account to my card. I pretty much clicked two buttons and had a British bank account that I could access in England.

So now I can transfer $100 from my Ally checking account to my Wise account. It goes into my American account there and with a click of a button, I can convert it to GB pounds that I can access.

There is a small transfer fee (it does fluctuate a bit but as of writing this, to convert $100 costs $1.21

Then Wise uses the real exchange rate at the time of the conversion. So in this example, my $100 would immediately become £80.69 that I could access.

Honestly, I can’t tell you if it’s the cheapest way to convert currency. I do hope to eventually provide you with that information, but my research is nowhere near done.

I can say that it is a super reasonable fee and overall the ease of use is just phenomenal.

Wise as 25+ currencies available for you to set up accounts. On mine I have US, UK, and Euros setup.

There is a one time fee of $9.00 to get your physical debit card. Technically just setting up the bank accounts without the card is free, but I have found the card useful.

If you lose the card, it costs $5.00 to replace. When it expires, it is replaced for free.

You can make 2 or less withdrawals of less than $100 for free. It costs 2% of the amount over $100.00. After 2 withdrawals it costs $1.50 per withdrawal plus the 2% of the amount over $100.00.

So if you’re a heavy ATM user, this might not be your most economical option.

So what are the catches?

I will say the first thing I tried to do was set up a cell phone account and EE did not accept this type of bank account. That seems really ridiculous, but it did make me anxious since it was the first time I tried to use the account here.

(Note that if you are just moving to the UK, you can pay as you go monthly to get a SIM card that works immediately, the deals are just better with a monthly plan and you don’t have to go to the store each month to top up your account.)

That being said…

My cell phone was the only speed bump I hit.

I paid my landlord my rent via the UK bank account info from my Wise card. I had to pay out the entire lease, so it was a substantial amount and there were no issues with the transfer.

I setup Internet, gas, electricity, and water with the UK bank account from my Wise card.

I pay for Deliveroo (the UK version of Uber Eats/Doordash) with my Wise card.

I set up the details for me to get paid at my part time job through my UK bank account from my Wise card.

Additionally…

I learned that Visa does this awesome thing where if you try to buy things online, you have to confirm the purchase via a text.

I cannot reset that phone number to a UK number.

So… my Visa cards are not very useful in the UK. They are actually fine for contactless payments in person, but not to buy anything online.

As I live here… you can imagine I buy things online as regularly as I did in the US.

So I do most of my online purchases with my Wise card.

Transfers

I found that the slowest part of the transfer is the speed of the sending bank. I had to transfer $10,000 at one point and it took 3 business days to turn up in my Wise account. PayPal is usually a smaller sum and so far it has always transferred the next day.

To transfer out of my Wise account, it says it sends in seconds. I don’t know if it’s actually seconds, but I can tell you my landlord did confirm receiving both a smaller and then a large amount by the end of the same day I sent both transfers.

Currency conversions happen immediately.

Overall, I think it’s a great tool for anyone who does a lot of traveling or lives their life between multiple countries.

If you’re interested in opening a Wise account, you can use my affiliate link here to save the fee on your first transfer up to $600.00 USD.