My first post at forumosa. A bit of a background: I moved to Taiwan 2 years ago, and have a solid job at a European company. I get my payroll in NTD to my NTD local bank account at MegaBank.
I’ve been saving over the past 2 years, which means that my NTD liquidity is rising. I have two major concerns.
I have absolutely no idea about the stability of the NTD currency, what concerns me are Taiwan’s political landscape and how that could affect the currency – what if one day I wake up and the past few years of payroll have “evaporated”? is this even a possibility?
If I do move out of Taiwan in the future, I would have two options to use my cash:
2a. I keep the cash in NTD, and use my Taiwanese ATM card at local banks (that would probably be either in Hong Kong, Thailand, or the Netherlands) – question of course is if a Taiwanese bank is OK with me doing this for years, and also which bank would take care of the currency exchange (the Taiwanese bank or the local bank?), and how much they would inflate the exchange rate
2b. I would have to use an international money transfer; unfortunately services like TransferWise.com do not support NTD. So the only option would be to use e.g. MegaBank’s international transfer or create other accounts at other banks (CitiBank?) – depending on what would be cheapest.
In case of worry 2 my main concern is that I would suddenly realize that about 10% of my earnings are gone. Who wants to work for 2 years and then realize that more than 2 months of work have gone entirely to the bank, for doing practically nothing?
Hope my post is clear enough. Let me know if I need to elaborate further.
That would be option 2b, right? So the transfer costs would still be there? And if I have a foreign account at MegaBank in Taiwan, and use the card in another country, is there no fee for using a foreign bank? I guess not, but just checking.
You can open a second account in foreign currency -any currency- at Mega Bank.
Taiwanese banks are not US banks. They do not charge an arm and a leg for services. Transfers will always have a charge and if you are a US citizen then you must, aside from the international 10 k restrictrions, comply with FATCA and whatever.
Citibank here, just as all other"foreign" banks, are NOT connected to their counterparts abroad. They cannot handle your US Citibank business, for example. Closest is opening an international account say with HSBC, but I think the minimum is like 3 million NTD. Look into it.
That said you are supposed to be able to use your Mega ATM card to take out money anywhere in the world -as long as the ATM has VISA function. You also need to activate that international roaming because you must select a different password -different from local-. 4 digits instead of 6 if I recall correctly.
As to political instability, we have heard the same story for 20 years, and IMHO
I think you can open foreign exchange accounts at almost all the banks…they will be linked to your initial NTD account and you can do the exchange yourself online.
