Philip

Being a British citizen and having a passport doesn't entitle you to have a UK bank account. It is legal for a bank to close an account, most bank have a clause in their terms and conditions saying something like they can close your account for any reason with X days notice (usually around 2 months). It could be argued that they have not treated you fairly, and this would merit a "formal complaint" which could be escalated to the UK financial ombudsman if not resolved satisfactorily. However barclays has made their decision and the ombudsman will not be making them keep your account open - at the most they may just give you a £50 "goodwill" payment (which would cover the forex fees I suppose). Without a functioning card reader there probably isn't much you could do without physically going to the UK - if you did have one you could have sent the money to yourself using Wise/Revolut for lower fees, and you could also have kept it in GBP. Alternatively if you have access to a UK address, lie about your residence status

I was researching this for my own knowledge and found the following information which may be useful - I have no experience with those services (not least because it will be 15 years before I can get my UK pensions) https://gmtax.com.au/super-uk-pensions/uk-pensions/uk-pensions-lump-sum/ https://www.directdocs.com.au/ozstomember.html

Well my UK house was finally sold and I got the money via Wise in 24 hours. Surprisingly, neither Wise nor any of the Australian banks involved asked for any documentation - and it was a 6 figure amount. This was the first time I had used my Wise account too (opened years ago in anticipation of sending money to Aus) which makes it even more surprising. They did charge several thousand quid but in the end it just works out as being a slightly worse exchange rate. I would have used Atlantic Money as a backup if Wise failed for some reason, but given their constraints, it would have needed to be done in 10 or more transactions and/or 3 transactions in person in the UK. Wise could do it in a single transaction and there was no need to interact with anybody at all. I have used the money to purchase a property here in Aus, and even more surprisingly my conveyancer did not care about the source of funds one bit. I did ask and he just told me a funny story of a dodgy client who sent the funds from 50 accounts in different names... unlike my UK solicitor, who when buying our UK house spent more time grilling us over the provenance of every pound than on the actual conveyancing (but to be fair it was fairly simple)

I would have thought that the Aus government, upon receiving the details of a foreign passport as part of the application for citizenship by descent, would prevent that foreign passport from subsequently being used to apply for a visa, however I know of people who have managed to get a visa (evisitor / ETA) and were allowed to Australia using the smartgates, so they never even had to tell an immigration officer they were actually a citizen.

For UK CGT, you work out the proportion of time it was your main residence and that portion is exempt (Private Residence Relief). For a property to be regarded as your main residence, it must actually be your home and you can only have one main residence at one time. If you have more than one residence which is actually your home, you can write to HMRC to choose one as your main residence (thus tax-free) but this is only retrospective for 2 years. Also the last 9 months of ownership is exempt regardless, and the whole period of ownership is counted regardless of which country you lived in. So roughly speaking with some assumptions - if you owned property 1 for 28 years and lived there for 1 year 3 months, 2/28ths of the gain is tax-free and CGT is due on 26/28ths of the gain. If you owned property 2 for 26 years and lived there for 7 years 3 months (from 2000) plus 2 years (from 2025), 10/26ths of the gain is tax-free and 16/26ths is taxable. If you give a property away or sell it for less than its market value to a related party such as children, it's treated as selling it for market value, so you should get a market valuation if you want to do this. For Australia, again you can only have one main residence at one time (unless moving house when there can be a 6 month overlap) and that period is exempt from tax. Different to the UK is that every time after moving out of a property, you can continue treating it as your main residence and thus tax-free for up to 6 years, which would suit someone who is renting (or living in a property that you expect to appreciate in value less). But as a foreign property you would only be taxed on the gain during the period you are an Australian resident. This period may have started on the day you arrived, or maybe when you were granted a permanent visa. If you return to the UK to work and stop being an Australian tax resident, you are treated as disposing of the properties on the day you depart, and CGT is due. If you don't want to pay tax on the unrealised gain at that point, you can choose to wait until you eventually sell, but then the ownership period when you are a non-resident is also taxed, and you would pay the non-resident tax rate (though you might be paying a high rate anyway if you have lots of income in the year you depart). However, I believe the UK double tax treaty lets you avoid Australian CGT in this case provided that UK CGT is paid on the same asset covering the same time period. So if you are moving back to the UK temporarily it is potentially wiser to sell both while you are there.

From the quoted link: So it isn't clear because they don't know and haven't decided. The old (actually, current) rules relating to IHT are here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/inheritance-tax-deemed-domicile-rules Someone mentioned that you have to move to Australia permanently and be out of the UK for 5 tax years before UK IHT ceases to apply to your worldwide estate, which I believe is correct. You can only be UK "non-dom" for income tax if you are actually tax resident in the UK, so if you are tax resident in Australia the changes will not affect you. To avoid UK IHT you have to put assets into trust before you become UK domiciled, but income from assets in trust is typically taxed at 45% in the UK. If you already domiciled in the UK and you put assets into trust you basically pay (less) IHT up front and possibly on an ongoing basis too.

I've come across https://atlantic.money/ which claims to charge a flat fee of £3 to send however much your UK bank account will let you send them by Faster Payments in one transaction.

Monzo, a UK app-only bank, doesn't require proof of address to open an account. But I wouldn't recommend it to receive money sent from Australia - it is better to use something like Wise and send to a different UK bank. HSBC will let you open a UK account from Australia even if you don't have an HSBC Australia account. But HSBC UK is very picky and they may debank you if you get a lot of money in and don't keep most of it with HSBC. You should not change your address on an Australian bank, from Australian to overseas, until you are sure you won't receive any more interest from that bank while still resident in Australia. This is because non-residents are taxed 10% on bank interest and this is withheld when your account has an overseas address. But if you are still resident the 10% will be wrongly withheld and you will have to sort it out on your tax return. You won't be a first home buyer in the UK if you have ever owned residential property in any country. It is possible to get a UK mortgage in those circumstances with the part-time job, depending on how much the job pays, but they are very unlikely to take into account the income from Australia unless you can somehow satisfy them that the amount in GBP will be regular and that it will be brought to the UK. You would need a specialist lender, probably with the help of a broker as high street banks generally can't be bothered with any complex circumstances.

Thanks for your reply. Centrelink said I could lodge a claim in July 2024 once I know our actual income for the current tax year - that would indicate nothing gets "lost" with a lump sum. They couldn't give a clear answer on the fortnightly claim. When we were leaving Australia in 1995 my dad would have gone to a medicare office to tell them (we moved to a country without reciprocal health care) but the form he filled in probably got lost, or there was no form and they just didn't act on it so never cancelled our medicare. Anyway I got it all sorted now. They said I should have applied for a yellow medicare card after moving to the UK https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+medicare+card&tbm=isch but given that you can no longer do it at an office and the email system takes 5 months (as I posted on the other thread) I'm not sure how that is meant to work for a UK resident staying in 2-3 hotels over the course of 1-2 weeks and then going home...

So I called again, the agent just said "yup I can see you emailed over a month ago, I'll process it now". It then took over an hour, no wonder the regular waiting time is 5 months Which minister decided to stop in person enrolments? At the Services Australia location I went to some staff were just sitting around until the next client came in @Kramvi as it's been more than a month and you haven't received your card yet, call during normal business hours and hopefully they will do yours straight away too

Yeah I went to services australia and they said they are not involved in enrolling. PRs and only PRs, not citizens, can enrol online, possibly immediately. But if you want a card for a family then you have to do it via the email service (or post). The call centre person said they are processing emails sent in Sept '23 right now. The problem is that I apparently have a card which was meant to be cancelled 5 years after my family stopped living in Australia (over 20 years ago) but that didn't happen. It's linked to my childhood address, but they won't tell me the number. I'll try what the person suggested about calling at 8.30am on Monday

I don't know why it says "you will get your card in 3-4 weeks" because I just called the medicare phone line and they said it will take 4-5 months from the date you sent the email. As long as you keep any receipts for now you should be able to claim whatever back later. One reason it may be taking so long is that you can skip the queue by calling during business hours. If you manage to get through to someone who can do enrolment on the phone they may be able to do it immediately

Has anyone here claimed this? I think we are eligible from the date of arrival in Aus as my child and I are citizens (wife is PR). My main question is: if I claim now for fortnightly payments, do I just lose the payments for the past 10 weeks, or do I get them later on when they do the balancing? If the former, then it would make more sense to claim a lump sum at the end of this tax year and then maybe fortnightly from July. BTW, is it really that rare for citizens to leave Aus as children and return to live for the first time as adults?? Things like mygov, centrelink ATO etc keep getting errors because I don't fit the box of new immigrant or a resident who has grown up being in the system. Today I spent 3 hours on the phone to centrelink until they realised someone entered one letter of my name incorrectly in 1990, but my parents never even claimed any benefits. Also discovered medicare has been sending a new card to my childhood home every 5 years for the past 25 years - and I learned that UK residents are actually meant to get a medicare card with a different colour, though I never needed the reciprocal healthcare when I visited.

Just for information, banks will not withhold any tax when the address is in Australia and the interest is less than $120 per year / $10 per month.

Personally with a 7 month deadline I would use an agent, because I would want to get it right the first time. My deadline was about 11 months but at the time I didn't realise UK applications were being processed so quickly, I thought it would take at least 6 months.

There are so many UK options to avoid foreign exchange fees I don't know why anyone still pays them. I have cards from Chase, first direct, Halifax, MBNA (not available to new applicants), Nationwide, Santander and Starling, as well as Revolut and Wise. Some of them even give cashback, which cancels out Visa/Mastercard's margin of 0.25-1% over the interbank rate. I wonder if that's because you need to submit ID (although not always verified) to have an Australian number so they regard it as a bit more "secure"? Australia seems worse than the UK for wanting a phone number for everything. I have an ANZ account and can log on to the website without 2FA - the website also lets me send up to $5000 (sometimes with 2FA, not always) while the app only lets me send $1000 What I dislike is banks that only let you have the app on one device - and especially those which require the app to log on to the website. 2FA by SMS is also really insecure - I hate that a tiny 100mm² card is necessary to function with so many organisations. I've also had the same email address for 25 years while I've had over 50 different phone numbers and 10 phones. You don't need to allow roaming to receive SMS though? In 2010 I got an amaysim number and it's been able to receive texts for free in the UK, even when it had no money on it (I had to remember to add $10 every year to keep it alive, but if I visited Australia I would use the $10 to buy 1GB of data and then it would be empty). I also note that Amaysim has a 9GB roaming package for $70 - cheaper than my 1p/MB UK O2 SIM.

I visited Glasgow frequently on business and if I manage to start my business in Australia (not sure if the market exists here) I will probably continue to visit frequently whenever I go back to the UK. I may be biased as the people I meet there are all natives, but I feel it's much more down to earth than Edinburgh. Hotel chains seem to have got overexcited and built too many new hotels in the past decade, so you can get good deals and they are keen to keep your business particularly outside of summer. But from May to August there are (like Edinburgh) too many Americans everywhere :p

I kind of expected this (I might post more rants in the next few months) but I guess that was part of the point of coming back. As a child it's basically all about school. I needed to experience living in Australia as an adult before I can truly decide where I want to live, and I want my family to have the same experience

The UK is the same though - it's just that the SRT explicitly tells you what ties you need to cut to be considered non-resident. But if I've understood the double taxation treaty correctly, you can tell HMRC to argue it out with the ATO. There's been talk about the Tories getting rid of inheritance tax - this is something that would affect me. As it stands, I believe I'd have to stay in Australia and out of the UK for at least 5 years before HMRC will stop wanting to take my stuff if I die.

This is mainly a rant as I am a bit incredulous with how utilities work in the unit/apartment where I am now living in Sydney. The system in the UK has its faults and quirks but it really doesn't compare. I had to speak to 5 people and search through other forums to understand the following, and I'm still not 100% sure. Like the UK, gas and electricity have standing charges and unit costs. The UK has banned variable unit costs but they still exist in Australia. In the UK, owners/tenants are liable for utilities from the day of completion (settlement in Australian) or the start of rental contract, but here it seems to be from the date the meter is read. My meters are analog with dials, but they can somehow be read remotely even though they are not smart meters. Despite this, they were not read until 5 days after settlement, therefore I only became responsible for the bills on that day, saving me about $8 in standing charges. A human meter reader would need two keys from two different people to access the meters physically, as that's what I needed to arrange to confirm the energy company had the right numbers. Both of these staff said they had only been to the meter area once before, indicating that nobody else cares that they're being billed correctly. In the UK, gas is charged in kWh, but meters measure cubic metres or cubic feet. You just have to trust that the energy company converts properly, but the conversion factor doesn't vary that much across the UK. (They do often get mixed up between imperial and metric.) In Australia gas is charged in megajoules, but in my building it is measured in "kilolitres of hot water". This is because there is a single gas boiler that makes hot water for everyone. The gas bill however shows not kilolitres, but "decalitres of hot water". A complex formula is used to determine how many megajoules of gas are assigned as having been used to heat each decalitre. Obviously the true amount of gas used varies with the outside temperature and how many other people are using hot water at the same time (as well as the variables that make up the UK conversion factor), but these are just ignored. Then there is a fixed daily charge for "gas cooktop" (hob in British). Which means that gas for cooking is "free" as I pay the same no matter how much I use. I was initially considering replacing it with an electric or induction hob, but apparently I'd still have to pay the fixed charge for the gas. Cold water is separate from hot water and is also "free" as there are no individual meters. Why the builder was able to put in hot water meters but not cold water meters, I cannot answer. The complex has a single cold water meter so the usage is charged through the strata fees, apportioned to the floor area of each apartment regardless of actual use. When I bought the property, I had to repay the previous owner the strata fees he had paid in advance for the rest of this year, which seem to have included last year's water usage, meaning this year's will be paid next year. Or perhaps it is just 3 months in arrears, it's not very clear. To top that off, every apartment also receives an individual bill from Sydney Water for a fixed connection charge. Why not just include this in the strata fee too?

Interesting that glasses are cheaper for you in the UK. After I moved to the UK, I was still on my parents' private health insurance for a number of years. So my dad "forced" me to get new glasses frequently, the co-pay was around $150 in 2013. Looking at what my wife was paying in the UK, I decided I wouldn't get new glasses until we moved back to Australia, but it took much longer than expected until we were ready to do so, which meant I had no choice but to pay £580 in the UK around when covid started. Obviously there has been inflation but last month an optometrist in Australia told me a new pair with the same sort of features as my current glasses would be around $600-700.

The HSBC AU 2% cashback is only on contactless ("tap & go") transactions, which need to be $99.99 or less. You don't get it if you insert the card. Max $50 back on $2500 per month but it's quite difficult to spend that much (under $100 remember) unless you eat out all the time. You also don't get cashback on public transport or government transactions. It certainly helps when so many merchants add a 1-1.5% card surcharge. I would be using cash for everything if I didn't have this card! Although some card machines manage to detect it's a local debit card and send the transaction through EFTPOS instead of Visa/MC. This means they don't surcharge (or charge less) even though you've tapped.

It's far more complicated than that... see https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/residence-domicile-and-remittance-basis/rdrm11520 which explains it as simply as possible and still takes about 20 pages. To my understanding, however, even after you are determined to be a UK tax resident that can still be overridden by the UK-Australia double taxation treaty, which states

Unlike in the USA, credit "scores" are not that relevant in the UK, and even less so in Australia. I would guess that NZ is more like Australia than the US. If you have Amex in NZ you can use it as a reference to open an Australian Amex. If you have HSBC Premier in NZ you can get HSBC Premier in Australia and only need to qualify in one country, but when it comes to borrowing money each country's bank will assess you separately on local criteria. Despite the name I believe the only relationship between ANZ Australia and ANZ NZ is that they will submit an application to open an account before you actually travel.

Although we could have done the tourist>bridging>onshore route, we decided to get my wife's visa in the UK. This is because all the evidence we needed for the visa was in the UK. Any physical documents have to be scanned in. If we were going for the 820, we would have needed to scan them in advance and if doing that, why not just apply straight away. Or else we would have had to bring all the documents to Australia, a difficult task, not to mention having to go back to the UK if they wanted some other document that we didn't bring. You will also need character statements from friends/family and the best people to do this for us were in the UK. And if you have started living in Australia then you need documents from Australia which may be impossible to get as a tourist. In the end the 309/100 visa took much less time than we thought it would. Once we arrived in Australia with my wife being a PR, we could get started on everything straight away e.g. bank account, driving licence, medicare, buying property. With a temporary/visitor status and not knowing how long the permanent visa might take, these would be difficult and require extra steps in the future. We also considered bringing our son on a tourist visa and then applying for his Australian citizenship by descent after arrival. As we planned not to leave Australia for around 1-2 years he would not have been obliged to get an Australian passport until later, saving some money, but we decided that was a false economy. Lithuania will hold a referendum on multiple citizenship in May 2024. Around 75% or more of Lithuanians seem to be in favour of allowing it, as a similar referendum was held in 2019, which only failed because it required a yes vote from 50% of the electorate. It appears the upcoming referendum will be mandatory. Assuming a yes vote, it will still take some time for laws to be updated. If your eldest son is meant to start English school in September 2024, he may not need to start NSW school until February 2026. He would have the option to start in February 2025. So if the aim is to start school with the rest of the cohort, then you might still have time for your husband to get British citizenship if it all works out. The UK citizenship application does ask you where you intend to live and I don't know if answering Australia has a negative effect...