Withdrawing funds

albright said:

My first question, is which EMI to choose, and why. I have seen some suggestion that Mister Tango is best suited for Belize, but why is that? What about Advcash and Revolut? What's the difference?

You may start with Mister Tango to get a IBAN account and debit card, always a good idea and then go with AdvCash if required, in that way you split up the money. With the setup I'm preparing for yoi then you may go with a Revolut account too if needed or to go safe and split up your money into several entities.

All three of the above mentioned support BTC so it's perfectly fine to go that route if BTC is required as well as a debit card and IBAN account number.

albright said:

My second question is does the EMI need to be set-up as a corporate account? If so, I've read here that a Mister Tango corporate account costs EUR 500/month, which is too much for me to consider it a viable option. In which case, would a Mister Tango personal account set-up with darks work for my purposes? Bear in mind, the UK company needs to pay someone/something for services rendered - does it matter if its a company or an individual?

I would go with personal accounts with the EMI's due to the setup you get it you don't need to care that much about privacy, at least I would do so with Mister Tango because of the high monthly fee which I think is "only" 300 now! with Revolut I would open a business account since it can be a benefit to have somehting in the company name and with AdvCash I would do personal account depending on what it is you want to use this for.

albright said:

My third question, is how to get this money out. I've seen people talking here about simply using the dark EMI debit/credit card for purchases and treating this as your everyday bank, however I have some reservations about storing large amounts of money in a dark EMI, especially having read some stories on here of people's accounts being frozen and losing access to their money.

You always have to be carefull, but that's also why you want to open several EMI's for your money to be splitted. So far I have only read vague information about peoples account have been frozen! It's not a scenario I have seen or heard about yet.

albright said:

That would be a disaster scenario.

I agree!

albright said:

I've also read of people moving the money from the EMI to a Bitcoin wallet. Given the volatility of Bitcoin, the logical next step would be to then convert this into Fiat, but how so? I assume you can't just move from:

EMI (dark) > Bitcoin (dark) > Bitcoin (real) > Bank (real)

Why not? It's possible, you can open a personal Mister Tango in your real name to withdraw the money. Just note, in case MT reports you to the tax auth. then you will have to pay tax of the money that you transfer from the "darks" to the real world.

albright said:

So far, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee security of the money, would be to take it out from the dark EMI as cash. This removes the risk of the (sometimes questionable) EMI one day running away with the money or discovering the account is dark and freezing it, and it also avoids the risk of the volatile Bitcoin solution resulting in drastic price differences as time goes by.

True, you may do that in EUR or USD and not a local currency if you want to be 120% safe! So you will need a safe place to store the money!

albright said:

The objective of all of this is not just to save money, but also to be able to use it, without a constant fear in the back of my mind that it might someday disappear because it is not stored in my real name.

That's the bad site of this entire setup, you can't hide from the tax man or any public auth. and at the same time be 100% safe. It's a question about to wight the risk somehow.

albright said:

One last question - if I also create a real personal account with an EMI as you suggest, if the EMI does not currently report CRS but decides to do so in the future, even if I stop using them at that exact moment, will my historical transactions also be shared?

Some here on the forum say they will while others say they will not. Personally I believe all account activity will be shared specially for accounts opened in 2018! I know that for the past and before all this s**t was set to go only the last years activity was reported.

albright said:

I suppose that although I may incur personal taxation in this scenario, I will still have avoided the company corporation taxes.

Yes if you take the money home through your bank account you need to pay tax from the money! However, as long as the EMI does not report anything or if you use the EMI with darks you will be able to withdraw the money in an ATM, only up to 10K at a time.

Not sure if this is sufficient.

Alternatives are to pay expenses you may have where your name does not appear. This means not Flight tickets.