Tess Vigeland
speaker
155 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 13 Apr
Tess Vigeland’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 Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Craig, I wish I had had that or known about that when I was abroad. That would have been super helpful. I actually don't remember doing any international transfers of money. I always used either an ATM from a debit card with, again, no foreign transaction fees, and I had two of those from separate banks, or I used a credit card.
When I did have a local bank in Bangkok, which, by the way, I had to hire a fixer to help me get that account, I literally would go and take money out of ATMs on multiple trips because I had a daily maximum withdrawal, and then I would deposit that in the local bank.
It really sounds like a bit of a pain, but it wasn't because the rent was pretty low, and I just kind of got used to making those cash withdrawals. I would imagine even in these... Six years since I came back stateside that maybe there are easier ways today, as Craig has just outlined. That also depends on the country that you're in.
I also did a little digging on the listener's question about banks that the U.S. and Spain have in common. The Euro-American Financial Advisors website points out that there are several international banks that work in this situation, including Deutsche Bank, HSBC and BBVA. Santander is another global bank with a presence in both countries. So you could go that route.
It's pretty easy to find credit cards these days without foreign transaction fees. And I would echo that it is an absolute must. I also, like Craig, made sure I had a lot of financial redundancies in case I lost a wallet or something like that. So I had multiple credit cards from different banks. I think I took five or six with me abroad.
And I would leave some behind in my Bangkok apartment when I traveled so that there would be backups at home, not with me. And then I traveled with two or three of my wallet just in case one didn't work at whatever restaurant or store street food vendor. Just kidding, the street food vendors in Southeast Asia generally didn't take credit cards.
And one other note, it's really important that you get a VPN when you're traveling if you wanna be doing online banking because banks will often flag a call from abroad as potential fraud. So you wanna be able to use a VPN that connects you into a server in the US so that you can then do online banking with your bank. I had this happen multiple times where they would shut down my account
because they thought it was, you know, some scamster abroad. So definitely pay attention to that as well.
Yeah, I lived through three tax seasons abroad, and my best advice is basically the same. Get a tax accountant back home. Have them do it for you. One thing that my tax accountant flagged while I was abroad was that the IRS requires that you disclose any foreign bank accounts.
As I already mentioned, while I was living in Bangkok, I did have a local account at a bank there so that I could pay rent through them, and that information did go on my tax returns for those three years.
Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast. I'm Tess Vigeland in for Sean Piles.
And this is our weekly money news roundup, where we break down the latest in the world of finance to help you be smarter with your money. We'll go deep into a single topic, then leave you with the latest money headlines. And today we're talking about AI. And shopping. And AI. I think you and I can maybe just sleep for the rest of today's episode and, you know, let the robot overlords take over.
Oh, yeah, I like that. That's much better. So for today's very special pre-Black Friday episode, we welcome not one, but two fellow nerds to the microphone. Amanda Barroso covers consumer credit for us here at NerdWallet, and Kurt Wook covers mortgages. But more to the point is NerdWallet's chat GPT experimenter-in-chief. Hey there to both of you. Hey, Tess. Hi.
So have either or both of you been just waiting for Black Friday to do your holiday shopping, or are you maybe done already with the help of artificial intelligence?
waiting for the sales.
Okay. Well, Amanda, why don't you start us off here? Why are we talking about AI?
I'm all for anything that stops the spinning of the wheels. This might be some folks' first time experimenting with AI of really any kind. So where do you suggest people go to get started?
So here's what I don't understand as a newbie to this world. If you have to enter a query anyway, why use ChatGPT rather than Google or Reddit or a review site?
Fun.
It's really a lot more specific.
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