Keeping access to your money when your number changes
A new SIM can lock you out of your own bank. What to change before you fly, what to never rely on a single phone for, and what to do the day access is gone.
This is the quietest way a two-country life goes wrong, and almost nobody plans for it. You land, you put in the other SIM, and a month later your bank at home sends a one-time code to a number that is sitting in a drawer eleven thousand kilometres away.
It is not an emergency until it is, and by then you often cannot fix it without being in the other country.
The problem in one sentence
Most banks, and most government services, prove it is you by sending a code to a phone number. If that number stops working for you, so does the account.
Before you fly
- List every account that sends a code to a phone. Banks in both countries, government services, email, the app store, the accounts that reset all the others.
- Move what you can to an authenticator app rather than a text message. The app lives on the device, not on the SIM, so changing numbers does not break it.
- Save the backup or recovery codes each service offers, on paper, somewhere that is not the phone.
- Add a second way in wherever it is offered: a second email address, a second device, a recovery contact.
- Keep the old number alive if you can. A cheap plan that only receives texts is usually less than the cost of one day locked out.
The one thing to check specifically
Your email. It is the key to almost everything else, so it should be the account with the strongest protection and the one that does not depend on a single SIM. If somebody reaches your email, the phone number stops mattering.
When you land
Do not cancel the old number on the first day. Move the accounts across one at a time, check each one works with the new number, and only then let the old one go.
If access is already gone
Contact the bank by phone or in a branch rather than through the app, and expect to prove who you are in other ways: passport, address, account history, an existing card. Both Australian and Indian banks have processes for this and neither of them is quick from abroad, which is the reason to do the work in advance.
If somebody else has taken over the number rather than you having lost it, that is a different and more urgent problem. IDCARE is a free service in Australia and New Zealand that helps people work through identity compromise, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes what to do first.
While you are doing this
Write down which number each account actually uses. The half hour it takes is the same half hour you would otherwise spend on hold from another continent.