Are there alternatives to double currency account to manage payments in different currencies?
Yes, there is indeed a great alternative for all European residents: getting a Revolut account. Revolut is a fully-online bank who's main benefits include the lack of fees (with some limits) and a great exchange rate for all currency operations (better than what you would get at any brick and mortar bank in Europe). In your particular scenario it would work as following: This is what I personally use to handle a salary in EUR while living in Czech Republic. Things might change in the future once they run out of investor money, but for now it's the only solution I know for converting currencies without a loss. You could use a Credit or Debit Card running in US $, drawing from your US$ account, and pay everything with it. If you pick a company with free foreign conversions, you would get the standard interbank exchange ratio every time you pay, with no fee. For the small payments where credit cards are not accpeted or useful you can convert some cash once every some month - all significant amounts should work with credit or debit card. Cheaper and faster are usually mutually exclusive. If you want faster, nothing is faster than cash.  I would recommend using an ATM to withdraw cash from your USD account as Florints and then use as appropriate. If you want cheaper, then the cheapest currency conversion commonly available is foreign exchange / transfer services like OFX / XE Trade / Transferwise.  Turn around time on these can be as little as a business day or two but more commonly takes a few business days, but they typically offer the best currency exchange rates at the lowest cost.  If you must make regular payments to 3rd parties, you can set these services up to send the converted currency to a 3rd party rather than back to your own account. Banks in certain countries are offering such facility. However I am not aware of any Bank in Hungary offering this. So apart from maintaining a higher amount in HUF, there by reducing the costs [and taking the volatility risks]; there aren't many options.
You could of course request payment in EUR or USD, maybe keep a PayPal account and just leave the funds in PayPal unless you need to withdraw the money in local currency? Either currency would be fine because the problem you are trying to overcome is the instability in the ruble. EUR and USD both accomplish that. If you can get local clients to pay in EUR or USD (again, PayPal seems like an easy way to accomplish that) you avoid the ruble, but at the risk that your services become more expensive to local clients because they have to convert a weaker currency to a stronger one. You should also solicit some international clients! You are obviously perfectly fluent in English and that's a significant advantage. And they'll be happy to pay in dollars and euros. Today typically a Business needs to hold accounts in more than one currency. Banks in certain countries are offering what is called a dual currency account. It is essentially 2 accounts with same account number but different currency. So One can have an account number say 123456 and have it in say AUD and USD. So the balance will always show as X AUD and Y USD. If you deposit funds [electronic, check or cash] in USD; your USD balance goes up. Likewise at the time of withdrawal you have to specify what currency you are withdrawing. Interest rates are calculated at different percentage for different currencies.  So in a nutshell it would like operating 2 accounts, with the advantage of remembering only one account number. Designate a particular currency as default currency. So if you don't quote a currency along with the account number, it would be treated as default currency. Otherwise you always quote the account number and currency. Of-course bundled with other services like free Fx Advice etc it makes the entire proposition very attractive. Edit: If you have AUD 100 and USD 100, if you try and withdraw USD 110, it will not be allowed; Unless you also sign up for a auto sweep conversion.  If you deposit a GBP check into the account, by default it would get converted into AUD [assuming AUD is the default currency] Your assumption that funds sold in GBP trade in GBP is incorrect. In general funds purchase their constituent stocks in the fund currency which may be different to the subscription currency. Where the subscription currency is different from the fund currency subscriptions are converted into the fund currency before the extra money is used to increase holdings. An ETF, on the other hand, does not take subscriptions directly but by creation (and redemption) of shares. The principle is the same however; monies received from creation of ETF shares are converted into the fund currency and then used to buy stock. This ensures that only one currency transaction is done. In your specific example the fund currency will be USD so your purchase of the shares (assuming there are no sellers and creation occurs) will be converted from GBP to USD and held in that currency in the fund. The fund then trades entirely in USD to avoid currency risk. When you want to sell your exposure (supposing redemption occurs) enough holdings required to redeem your money are sold to get cash in USD and then converted to GBP before paying you. This means that trading activity where there is no need to convert to GBP (or any other currency) does not incur currency conversion costs. In practice funds will always have some cash (or cash equivalents) on hand to pay out redemptions and will have an idea of the number and size of redemptions each calendar period so will use futures and swaps to mitigate FX risk. Where the same firm has two funds traded in different currencies with the same objectives it is likely that one is a wrapper for the other such that one simply converts the currency and buys the other currency denominated ETF. As these are exchange traded funds with a price in GBP the amount you pay for the ETF or gain on selling it is the price given and you will not have to consider currency exchange as that should be done internally as explained above. However, there can be a (temporary) arbitrage opportunity if the price in GBP does not reflect the price in USD and the exchange rate put together. I don't know how taxes work in Israel, but I imagine it is relatively similar to taxes in the US. In the US you need to pay taxes on investment earnings when you sell them or in this case trade them for something of value. The amount that would typically would be taxed on would be the difference between how much you paid for the currency and the value of the item you traded it for.  In theory there shouldn't be any difference in trading bitcoins versus dollars or euros. Reality is that they are rather weird and I don't know what category they would fall into. Are they a currency or a collectors item? I think this is all rather hypothetical because there is no way for any government to track digital currencies and any taxes paid would be based on the honor system.  I am not an account and the preceding was not tax advice... "My solution when I lived in Singapore was to open an account with HSBC, who at the time also had branches in the US. When I was home, I used the same debit card, and the bank only charged a nominal currency exchange fee (since it never had to leave their system, it was lower than had it left their system). Another option, though slightly more costly, is to use Paypal. A third option is to cash-out in CAD and convert to USD at a ""large"" institution - the larger your deposit/conversion balance, the better the rate you can get. To the best of my knowledge, this shouldn't be taxable - presuming you've paid the taxes on it to start with, and you've been filing your IRS returns every year you've been in Canada." "From personal experience of having been abroad for a while for work, I found the simplest method to be to Paypal it to myself from one country to the other. Yes, you incur a transaction fee - but it was always less expensive than ""real"" bank fees for me. Also - if you use a bank that has offices in both countries, adding an authorized user with a debit card and having them visit the bank every X often and making a withdrawal is a viable route." I use MoneyStrands (formerly called Expensr), but mostly just to track expenses and look at reports on my spending habits. It has some really pretty charts, with the ability to drill down into categories and sub-categories, or graph monthly spending for any custom date range. It does a half-decent job of auto-categorizing the imported bank transactions, and you can set up additional rules for common vendors, but I still have to do some manual work after each import. It does a good job of integrating my credit cards, bank accounts, and I can even manually add cash transactions. It has some basic budgeting capabilities, but they're not very useful for someone who needs to carefully budget thier monthly spending. Another one I've heard about is mint.com, but it only supports American banks (last I heard, anyway). I used to use Quicken, but support for that has been suspended in the UK.  I had started using Mvelopes, but support for that was suspended as well!  What I use now is an IPhone app called IXpenseit to track my spending.