Re: International Touring....... Per Diem
This is a question for the ones doing international touring, what do you do with your per diem on a long run? I usually don't spend much while I am on the road, but I also hate carrying a lot of cash with me while traveling. Occasionally the tour can direct deposit it before ad during the tour, but that is not always an option. I have never tried to deposit US$ into a foreign bank that I do not have an account with. Any ideas?
Thanks
Steven
This is a good thing to work out ahead of time... direct deposit most of it to your home bank acct, with perhaps some regular walking around money on the tour, and have a credit card for emergency needs.
You don't say but ASSuming you are an American citizen, depositing money into a foreign banks may set off warning bells at Big Brother central (IRS), and at a minimum may make your tax returns more complicated. It might even increase likelihood of IRS audits, especially if you don't fit neatly into one of their categories. While generally low income levels discourages audits, since they want to find lots O' hidden cash, and it takes roughly similar work effort to audit a poor puke as a rich one.
I don't know but there may be foreign branches of some big dog US banks in some large foreign cities (like London or Paris), so if you can deposit funds into your US acct. from over there, that should not raise any flags. Sometimes there are weirdnesses with cross border exchange rates. So check with bank if you can deposit a dollar denominated check, or US cash, into your dollar acct, even over there... repatriating dollars to the US should be relatively simple (from a major country), depositing other than dollars will incur fees and conversion exchange rates.
if you don't expect to need the cash why round trip it... ? The way things are going in Europe at the moment you probably don't want to deposit it into a Spanish bank (mostly kidding ). The EU authority will not let the member state banks fail, but they are still working on getting Germany to co-sign, like a rich uncle, for the rest of the Euro zone region's sovereign debt. So you might want to get paid in dollars not euros, while that can go up and down with the weather reports, and Iran's military exercises near the straits of Hormuz (they are unhappy about new oil sanctions, so saber rattling to threaten the west's oil supply from the region which will probably make dollar relatively stronger in the short term -in a fear trade).
JR
edit- in fact I think it it is a federal beef to have a foreign bank acct and not report it to the IRS,, they recently busted some non US citizen working here, because he had an old account in you guessed it his own country.... /edit
