You’re thinking of going out on a globetrotting adventure, but you aren’t sure your financial affairs are in order. The following checklist should help you feel better about taking on the experience of a lifetime.
Notifying Financial Institutions
One thing you need to do is reach out to the financial institutions with whom you hold accounts. This includes your banks and credit card companies. You need to tell them that you’ll be traveling soon, and be specific about the countries and cities you’ll be visiting. The reason you are doing this is to ensure you can continue to access your cash. Financial institutions pay attention to card activity, and if something happens they don’t expect, they might freeze your account, thinking your identity is compromised. You don’t want this issue while traveling.
Insurance While Traveling
The next thing you want to think about is the insurance you might need while traveling. Right off the bat, you want to purchase a health care insurance policy, just in case something happens while you are abroad. On that note, you might want to consider an international life insurance policy as well. A 500k life insurance policy might be too much, but you need one that fits your budget either way. Some life insurance policies won’t pay anything if something were to happen while you are abroad.
Leave a Financial Safe
It might be a good idea to print out information regarding all of your financial assets. You’ll want to write down your pins, passwords, and o. Place everything inside a safe and give the location to someone you trust. Have the name and number of this person with you at all times while you are traveling abroad. The reason you are doing this is so that this person can act on your behalf should something happen to you overseas. Ideally, nothing will happen, and this will be a precaution, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Think About VAT
VAT, or value-added tax, is something most travelers don’t think about, but it’s something you shouldn’t overlook. VAT is something that could end up increasing the cost of purchase by almost 30 percent, and that’s not great. The thing most folks forget is several places around the world are willing to give back some of these taxes to nonresidents. If you do a lot of shopping abroad, you don’t want to leave behind all that cash when you can reclaim it. Remember that you can only claim VAT money if you spent money from participating vendors, not street vendors who won’t offer you the receipts you need.
Automatic Payments Work
Be sure to set up automatic payments. While you are traveling abroad and seeing all the wonders of the world, one thing you might end up forgetting is to pay your bills. You don’t want to do this, especially when the solution is just to set up automatic payments. You’ll want to do this with everything you can, and cancel all services that you won’t be using. Keep in mind that you won’t always have internet service while you are traveling around the world. If you can’t connect, you might not be able to pay a bill manually, and that means you may have to pay a late fee. No one wants to pay late fees, especially while traveling when cash flow isn’t always fair.
It may be a good idea to talk to a financial advisor before taking this trip if you want more help. These are a few things to consider, but the conversation keeps going.