How To Get a US Personal, Business and Merchant Bank Account For Less than $500
It took me over three years to be able to get myself a US personal bank account, a business account and perhaps the holy grail of the industry – a decent US merchant account that charges reasonable rates.
I’m English and not once needed to set foot in the USA to get any of this setup. In total I don’t think I spent more than $500.
For those of you needing a similar setup, keep reading.
1) You’ll need to incorporate your business in America. Delaware and Nevada are the two states that have the greatest tax advantages. I strongly suggest incorporating in Nevada for a number of reasons.
- There’s no income tax nor corporation tax
- The IRS are not able to access your banking records if you bank here
- Your obligations as the company president are nearly zero
- Non-Americans can be registered as th company president
- The bank I’ll be recommending has branches in Nevada but not Delaware.
I recommend IncParadise.com to register with. Get friendly with Natasha Waite there, she’s the office manager and she’s very friendly, very accommodating and a great lady to have on your side. I can’t remember their fees but I registered a C-Corporation here for less than $500. Every year I pay less than $100 for admin fees etc and I only need to submit one document covering the minutes of my annual meeting every 12 months.
2) Now you’re registered in Nevada, get in touch with Citibank. They have branches in Nevada. Speak with Robert Arnall (702-361-2365) who is the manager of Citibank N.A. and mention your business has incorporated with IncParadise. Robert’s awesome and he’ll hopefully get you set up with both a business account and personal account.
3) You’ll probably now need at least 6 months of transaction history before getting approved for a merchant account. I accepted payments from PayPal first. After you have a nice history of transactions, get in touch with Marcy Mason (marcymason {at} cox.net) who is an independent agent for a variety of merchant account providers. You’ll need to discuss with her all the information you’re going to need when applying. Marcy has a good relationship with Citibank N.A. The only things that presented a problem were …
- I did need a US person to provide their name on the account. This is because all merchant accounts require a SSN which I can’t get. I asked a friend to provide this for me and thankfully he signed the application without any issues. As a sign of gratitude I provided him with a signed document offering him my personal guarantee that I would take full responsibility for the account.
- The merchant account I applied for would not accept a series of PayPal screenshots as the equivalent of a trading statement. Instead I decided to make it look more like a statement using a HTML editor and then faxed the file to myself so that it looked like PayPal had faxed me my statement. This worked fine.
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