Craig Joseph
speaker
277 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 19 Aug
Craig Joseph’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely, Megan. Thanks for having me.
Hey, gang, glad to be back.
So in my previous life as a geologist, I wrote a proposal that was funded and sent me to work with another geologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. If I remember correctly, I had about three months to prepare for the trip, which included everything from figuring out how to rent an apartment from abroad to how to safely move a few hundred pounds of rocks around the globe.
And as it turns out, airport security in some countries consider rocks to be a weapon and don't let you carry them on a plane, especially in the quantities I had. So that's one of the many things I wish I would have known before moving abroad.
My story is a tale of I wish I knew then what I know now. So I'll preface this by saying I wasn't much of a personal finance nerd back then. I did keep my credit union checking account to pay for recurring expenses at home, like my storage unit and car payment. And my plan was also to use that debit card abroad.
Confirmed this would work with the credit union, but I'll sheepishly admit that I made two big mistakes. The first mistake was not asking about fees or understanding that I'd incur foreign transaction fees each time I used my debit card abroad. And the second was not having an account that reimbursed ATM fees.
After a couple of weeks of paying 3% in fees each time I wanted to access my money, I looked into opening a checking account in New Zealand. But even then, I was looking at significant fees for transferring money from the US to that account. So if there's any piece of advice I can give to folks moving out of the country, it's to figure out how to avoid fees when banking abroad.
I do. And this actually gets into that topic of multi-currency accounts that you just mentioned, Sarah. Due to my lack of planning, I did have to transfer money from my account at home to New Zealand. And of course, I wasn't aware of how expensive those transactions could be.
The roommate that I found in New Zealand introduced me to an app-based service called Wise, which at the time it was called TransferWise. That allowed me to open a multi-currency deposit account so I could get paid in U.S. dollars, convert the U.S.
dollars to New Zealand dollars at a mid-market exchange rate within the same account, and then spend the money with an associated debit card without having to go through the process of having to select your currency when you check out with a purchaser transaction. And that account also let me transfer money in New Zealand dollars to my roommate's deposit account to pay for rent and utilities.
I think the fees were around three tenths of a percent per transaction. So still not perfect, but far, far less costly than my other options.
So if you're abroad for any period of time, to me, it's all about redundancy and getting ahead of problems before they arise. So having multiple cards issued by different banks can be a benefit in case one card becomes temporarily unusable, such as due to a fraud alert, and even better if those different cards operate on independent transaction networks, for example, Visa and MasterCard.
That way you still have options if there's an issue with one of the payment networks or if a vendor only accepts one of the other for a transaction. You only want to take cards abroad that don't pass on foreign transaction fees, and even better if you take cards that earn rewards in categories where you know your spending will be concentrated, such as restaurants or grocery stores.
And since you're traveling, a card that offers consumer protections like trip delay or lost baggage insurance could also be valuable.
Yeah, I did live abroad in New Zealand through tax season in the U.S. And at that time, my taxes were pretty straightforward. And I normally would have done them myself, but I hired a CPA who was a buddy of mine to do them that year since I didn't want to make any mistakes while I was out of the country. And I set up for any correspondence from the IRS to go through him.
That way, nothing would be missed while I was abroad and not actively checking my mail.
Yeah, glad to join y'all again.
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