International accounts and PayPal

[Dawid]

I just received my card today which makes me very happy!!

Recently I’ve been researching different banks as I’m taking few years “off” to travel and volunteer around the world and turns out my bank has the highest fees in the UK (thanks Lloyds!). I’m trying to come up with the best way to manage my finances and have few questions:

1. I’m assuming nobody can give me a concrete date but is there any indication where Monzo will offer full current account. I would like to avoid using big banks altogether. Anything like “not before Autumn 2017” would be helpful as it will allow me to plan.

2. Can somebody else top up my card?

3. Can I or somebody else use non-GBP PayPal account to Top Up my card and what fees would be added? Only PayPal fees?

4. I understand at the moment once the money is on the card you can’t move it anywhere else? Until the current accounts come on board I guess?

I’ll have more of those, apologies if some of them are obvious!

Can’t wait to start using the card on the road!

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Welcome to the community Dawid!

So…

@Dawid

I’m assuming nobody can give me a concrete date but is there any indication where Monzo will offer full current account. I would like to avoid using big banks altogether. Anything like “not before Autumn 2017” would be helpful as it will allow me to plan.

@tom

the answer is broadly “the first half of 2017”.

@Dawid

Can somebody else top up my card?

Yes, they can, using Monzo.me or ideally (since Monzo.me costs Monzo money) by bank transfer / standing order.

@Dawid

Can I or somebody else use non-GBP PayPal account to Top Up my card and what fees would be added? Only PayPal fees?

Funnily enough, another user tried this today. PayPal did charge conversion fees (having ignored his request to top up the card using foreign currency) but they did refund those fees -

PayPal ignoring request to pay in Foreign Currency

Thanks for sharing, @evan. I’m planning to pay for some accomodation soon and I planned to use Paypal/Monzo - so this is really helpful. Can you please explain how/where you could check that Paypal screwed up? I’ll pay extra attention to that. Screenshots would be much appreciated!

@Dawid

I understand at the moment once the money is on the card you can’t move it anywhere else? Until the current accounts come on board I guess?

You can withdraw your funds from an ATM of course & Monzo support can sometimes return a deposit to your bank account. But you won’t be able to transfer funds to non-Monzo users from your card (it’s best to get your friends to sign up too ).

@Dawid

I’ll have more of those, apologies if some of them are obvious!

This is a friendly community so please feel free to ask! But as you can see, quite a few of these questions have been answered in other posts so it’s worth searching first. If you can’t find the answer, no worries

[Avishai (Marta)]

Hi @Dawid I see that Alex already well informed you with stuff, I’ll only add one thing - limits. Not sure if you had noticed, but until Monzo becomes full bank, fairly substantial ATM withdrawal fees are in place (£1k/month and £3k/year if memory serves me right). Monzo already said that it will be revised once they become a full bank, but didn’t give any further details yet.

Those limits are not affecting normal card purchases, so I guess it depends where you go and what’s available - are cards widely accepted and you can pay with it 99% of the time or not really.

I made related research and seems like MoneyCorp’s card might be not a bad solution for you in the meantime. But we all know that Monzo absolutely rocks, even in beta.

[Dawid]

Thanks both for your answers. I’m currently revising my financial setup as working as a freelancer people sometimes prefer to pay me via PayPal but sometimes they charges fees up to 3%. I’m trying to find the best way possible (some fees have to occur I know )

The limits are not a problem, once I travel I will rarely spend/withdraw 1000GBP - if I could that would be great, but I won’t for sure haha

Monzo is still a good option for me, even while I am with my existing bank to keep my savings there until I can transfer to Monzo. I will perform a lot of tests with international bank accounts and PayPals to see where charges occur and will feed back any results!