Mistakes Non-Residents Make Opening A US Bank Account

don't make these mistakes when opening a bank account I know I talk a lot about Banks but I've had more and more clients coming to the US to open bank accounts in person and having issues and contacting me and me having to fix the issues and I recently just spent two hours at the bank at Chase Bank talking to the bankers trying to figure out stuff figure out what we can do trying to open an account and it was like you know my favorite thing to do I love going to the bank if you're planning

to travel to the US to open a bank account it is possible I'm going to give you tips on how to do it both for personal accounts and for business accounts and I'm going to go through exactly what documents you need in all of these situations so stick to it we're going to get through it I'm going to start with the easy stuff the personal bank accounts so if you're coming to the US from another country to open a bank account it is possible and here is what you're going to need the first thing your

passport you need some kind of passport document you need some kind of identification document generally if you're coming from a country you need a passport anyways bring your passport and the second most important thing you need is proof of residential address I was talking to a colleague of mine and apparently the Patriot Act requires personal accounts to have a residential address even if you use like a private mailing address a private mailbox like use my office or something for your personal account apparently they're going to close the accounts if it's not a business or if

it's not a residential address and obviously you know you can go on Google Maps you can search an ADD address and you can see if it's business or residential they have all kinds of Systems and Technology for verifying that so even if they open the account with a PMB a private mailbox it's uh it could get automatically closed pretty quickly because you don't have a residential address so you say James I'm not from the US I don't have a house there how do I get a residential address well there's a couple different ways and there's

different things I'm going to be trying myself which I will let you know but the first easiest way is to get a phone bill at a family member's house so if you have a cousin an uncle a best friend a best friend's cousin a best friend's Uncle you have someone with some kind of address in the US a house getting a phone bill for that address generally will work for proof of address another great option is a bank statement if you have another US bank account opened use that bank statement if you have a bank

State not an online bank it can't be an online bank unfortunately but if you have a bank account at like Bank of America a personal account with an address on it you can take that statement to Chase and they'll open you a personal account cuz like oh this is your proof of address generally you don't start with that you need to to get that first account to get that first account you need some kind of thing and the bankers at Chase this is what they're accepting you're not going to have any of those so utility

bill at the bottom they said they'll accept phone bills and the lady told me that you can go to you can go to Target and buy a prepaid phone and sign up for it and get a bill like that I've used t for clients in the past I think it's t.com it's online I think they have to mail the chip to you though so you need to have an actual mailing address so I think you can sign up for residential address and then a mailing address and this is also helpful for the business account so

I would recommend you kind of do this anyways a personal proof of address the other thing you need that's really important is a is a banker who will help you I've said this in other videos but you might go to the bank and they don't help you because they just don't know what they're doing or they've never worked with a non-resident they say you need a social security number listen you don't need a social security number you need a new bank or a new Banker so often times if you come to a city like Miami

where they're used to dealing with non-residents it's possible and you can do it uh you might have to go to three different Chase Banks you might have to go to two different Bank of americaas you might have to go to like if you try smaller Banks and you can check out the video I just did about ranking the banks I think that's a fun video where I kind of give a lot of insights to my experience with the banks but you can go to a lot of different banks and try and open accounts and if

you have a proof of address and a passport you have a pretty good chance to get an account open but if they say no keep it moving go to the next bank and the same is true for business accounts and I want to talk about opening business accounts in person because you need a little bit more documentation but the accounts are better for doing business you know it's just better to have a business account for doing business especially if you have an LLC so when you're going to the bank often you can open both and

I would recommend it if you're there just open both as long as you have proof of address at a residential address you then you also need some kind of proof of address for a your business as well they'll usually accept PMB a private mailbox or like a virtual like a virtual address like if you have a uh like a Wei work or co-working space or if you're a client of mine we give sub sues to you to our clients and we assign sub sues to them so that they can not really they can have a

a custom address a private mailbox but it's not like a a mail delivery service I have a co-working space here in Texas and I didn't have to sign anything where they're not a certified mail receiver but they can like collect all the mail they assign sub sues to people so it's a little less warm they'll accept those and I've and I've used the agreements with those agencies to be a business proof of address okay but it's still useful to have a personal improv address as well and even for a business account so I'd still recommend

doing that so back to the business account when you come to the US and you're going to open your business account you need passport articles organization if your company is older if you didn't open it this year you'll generally need a good standing certificate which is something you can generate for free at the Wyoming website or pay $30 or something for a Delaware website different states have different things you don't need it for Florida cuz they can look up the company and then we have the Ein letter you need that IRS EIN letter if you

lost it you can call them they can fax you a new one you'll need the proof of residential address not all banks require this most do and it's better to have it and then you need the proof of the business address which is going to be whatever agreement you have with your private mail service uh there's different options for setting this up there's online services people use Virtual postal mail people use I postal one there's there's like a million companies that do this but these are commercial companies there's smaller ones like my company that you

can work with that that isn't like a commercial mail agency but we do manage the mail for our clients and I think those Agreements are better and it's worked for us uh with the with the uh with our clients I think that's it you need a banker that'll that'll help you out so this is the same as the personal accounts many Bankers don't know what they're doing they'll say you need a social security number they'll say your company needs to be registered in our state and some states do that if you're going to Texas and

you're going to a bunch of Texas Banks half the banks going to say you're not registered in Texas we can't open the account for you many cities like Miami um major cities are used to having people from other states open bank accounts but they still can be annoying about it so it doesn't mean you have to register to do business in that state it just means you might need to find another bank or another Branch uh we've had the best luck with like the major Banks the big Banks but if you have a relationship with

a smaller bank and you have the proof of address it can still be possible to get the these accounts opened don't make those mistakes when going to when opening a US bank account the mistake is coming in unprepared without a proof of address that's the main takeaway from this video is that you generally need some kind of proof of address and here's how we're going to do it we're going to get a family or friend and we're going to get a phone bill T-Mobile Verizon maybe Google 5 those would be the best sometimes they're difficult

I we use T for a lot of our clients and apparently through the chase people they said you can just go to Target and buy a pre repaid phone and use that and that works so these are the options if you thought this was interesting I I love you you can watch this video about me ranking the banks I rank like the top what 12 Banks and I rank them on a a to F or whatever scale so check that out it's a fun video