Now my question is, would it be possible to open a foreign bank account without actually residing within a foreign country? Or what would be the best way to get my hard earned savings out of the country without fees eating up the capital should also perhaps be low risks. I do not want rand dominated funds etc, I want the money to be out off this country.
I am not looking for professional advise, I am just busy researching my options.
Your thoughts on this will be much appreciated
Yes it's possible. I have one and a number of other people do too, but it is quite a challenge. In your case it's probably not necessary. I'm busy doing a blog post on this actually. Might be ready this month but more likely next, what you really only need is a decent brokerage account that you can fund from this side.
The best way to do it at the moment looks like opening an account with interactive brokers, then funding it via a forex broker here. I've found forex rates of around 0.75% through clickfx, but I'm testing one at month end which may drop it to 0.7%.
Then you simply transfer your Rand into $ which are deposited in your interactive brokers account. From there you can buy shares on virtually every major stock market in the world.
If you end up overseas at some point you can easily open a bank account and link it to interactive brokers.