Babu wrote:I'm looking into stopping my Sabadell acct (with all the fees incurred, although I have no complaint with their services) used solely for covering taxes and community fees and opening a Starling Acct instead where I can gain benefit from spending Euros as a Non Res on exchange rates.
The advice I'm looking for is primarily;
Has anyone made the change, and does the bank manage it for you or do you have to do it all yourself with each DD etc ?
Sabadell charge every 2 years for some kind of non resident registration?? does this not apply to Starling as a British bank and/or do I have to cover this myself if they don't?
Looking for suggestions please.
I had (and still do, to some extent) have the same aims.
I have a Starling account in my name, and a joint account with my wife. I also have a Starking Euro account in my name.
The joint account is what we use when travelling - we just put money in theory and spend it on either of your joint account debit cards and this works perfectly (except my wife gets an alert every time I spend money on 'boys toys'!).
My previous Sabadell debit card had expired and my Spanish house and car insurance were up for renewal (these would have charged the renewal to my Sabadell card). This seemed like an excellent time to put some money in my Starling Euro account and give them by Starling IBAN rather than my new Sabadell card details.
However, this didn't exactly go to plan.
The house insurance did eventually get charged to my Starling Euro account, but my car insurer rang me and explained that UK IBANs often fail (999 timed out of 1000 is what I as told) and that if it did fail then I'd be charged a 50 Euro penalty. As I'd put the house insurance IBAN through about 2 weeks earlier and nothing had yet been charged to my Starling Euro account I wasn't confident that the car insurance would go through, si gave them ny Starling joint account card number to charge it to instead.
I've since realised that there is the option to link my Starling personal account debit card to my Starling Euro account, and this is what I plan to do. I'll then give companies this debit card details number and the debist will come out of my Euro account. Not as neat as IBAN route, as when the card expires I'll have to update the details with each utility company, but probably a reasonable compromise.
At first sight the N26 bank route seems preferable, with a Spanish IBAN, but they've recently announced that they will close all accounts held buy UK customers - because of Brexit!
Whether this applies when you say that your location is Spain, but as you'll be providing UK ID and presumably a UK address then I think you're skating on thin ice.
https://n26.com/en-gb/leaving-uk-does-not-change-our-global-vision-to-transform-retail-banking-for-the-betterPete.