If you’re a South African emigrant, you’re probably are aware of your annual exchange control allowances for transferring funds offshore. There are two principal allowances are:

• Single Discretionary Allowance (SDA) – R1M
• Foreign Investment Allowance (FIA) – R10M

Although these allowances are available to you each year, you need to start the process required for each, ideally by the 1st December to ensure that you can complete it in that specific year.

As the FIA requires tax clearance, many South Africans opt for the SDA when transferring amounts less than R1 million. But the rules of the SDA have posed several problems for those who have been living abroad for a while.

The SDA rules – a spanner in the works for South Africans living overseas

The single discretionary allowance may be used to transfer amounts of up to R1 million abroad for any legal purpose, including investments.

The requirements for transfer are:

• South African identification in the form of a green bar-coded South African ID document or Smart ID card.
• The individual concerned must be be a South African resident or using the allowance in the year during which they leave the country.

Of course, the latter poses a problem to South Africans who relocated abroad before 1 January 2015, but luckily there’s an olive branch in the form of a South African Reserve Bank (SARB) approved foreign exchange intermediary – finglobal.com.

The SDA-SA and finglobal.com

If you left before 1 January 2015 and have a need to transfer funds which amount to less than R1M finglobal.com can now make a special application to apply your Single Discretionary Allowance; the SDA-SA, as we’ve termed it. There’s no tax process and we can turn around an application in 7 – 10 working days.

If you’re one of the South African expats who want to utilise the SDA-SA, you’d better hurry up though – the deadline for the SDA-SA is 7 December. So don’t sleep on it! Let finglobal.com help you transfer your money offshore.

Simply leave your details and we’ll call you!