yamakazi51 said:
I have some spare USD cash (less than 5k USD), which I foresee not going to touch for quite sometime. Already set aside some amount for travel purpose, and mostly using CC nowadays anyway.
What should I do with it? Deposit to a foreign currency account? Any recommended one?
No.
If you’re not going to spend these U.S. dollars any time soon then your best choice is probably to take them down to Raffles Arcade, shop around for the best price, and exchange them. Then deposit your Singapore dollars (in a fee free way) and shunt them to your normal savings/investment program.
Another possibility, if you have a trip to the United States coming up, is to bring those U.S. dollars to Walmart or to the U.S. Postal Service and buy a money order. That’ll cost a couple dollars. Then mail the money order to Interactive Brokers, Schwab, or whomever you have as your U.S. broker, if you have a U.S. broker. Check ahead of time whether they’ll accept a money order; some don’t. Caution: a US$5K cash transaction is a
little suspicious, so I’d carry documentation that the U.S. dollars are yours. Civil asset forfeiture is a real thing. Go read up on it.
A slight modification to that U.S. trip advice is to go to Walmart and get a Bluebird card (US$5 at Walmart, or free if you order one online and have a U.S. SSN or ITIN and U.S. mailing address), and deposit the cash at Walmart onto the card. Then use that AMEX anywhere in the world you like at merchants that accept AMEX. There’s zero foreign transaction fee on that card, and there’s no monthly fee. (There’s also no interest.) Bluebird also supports “BillPay,” and it’s free, so you can generate a paper U.S. check from your Bluebird funds that’s then mailed anywhere in the United States. Free. Including to your U.S. brokerage account. That should work, but check ahead.
You can combine more than one of the above approaches, if you wish.
PLEASE don’t accumulate so much cash in the future. It’s nasty stuff, really. Chalk it up as a lesson learned.
I have about USD3k since my last trip in 2000. No interest and currency depreciated since then. Dunno whether the notes are still legal tender
They are, assuming they are genuine. (Most probably they are.) The United States has never “demonetized” any currency notes. Only substandard governments pull such stunts.
Notes and coins from the late 1700s when the U.S. was formed are still legal tender. Although, for old notes and coins, you don’t want to spend them ordinarily since they may have higher value as collectibles, and there are dealers who are interested in them.
I once received a 1930-something U.S. ten dollar note, just handed to me as change several years ago, many decades after it was printed. It looked a little different from the modern version but only a little. (One difference: that was still a “silver note,” as I recall.) No problem. I saved it, somewhere, but I cannot remember where I put it.
Money changers and merchants are under no obligation to accept particular notes — “legal tender” doesn’t mean what people think it means — but the U.S. government and U.S. banks will. You can even arrange to have damaged and/or burnt notes replaced. The U.S. Treasury has a service to do that, and they’ll do their best to try to count even very badly damaged notes, such as notes caught in a fire and seemingly charred beyond recognition. Handle them very carefully, send them to the U.S. Treasury (to the correct department), per their instructions, and they’ll try to figure it out.
