US bank account?

I have kept my US credit cards.  However, I have had problems with purchases being denied and my cards being blocked because someone at the credit card company thought an expensive purchase made outside of the United States might be fraudulent (even though my mailing address is in the same town where the purchase was made). I've been able to take care of these problems with a simple phone call; however, it's still not nice to be told there's a problem with your creidt card when you're in a shop with a queue behind you.

Do I have this right?
I can set up an account with Paypal in both countries, linked to my bank accounts in the respective couintries. Then I can load up my US paypal account with money from the US bank, transfer it to my UK paypal account and then on to the UK bank account?

Will this work?

Never mind, I just looked at the paypal site. I am restricted to 500.00 dollars a
month transfer. Not enough to be very useful to me.

You can get rid of that...I think all I had to do was give them my social security number or something like that and it got rid of the restriction...

Yep -- there's some way to raise that limit...but I can't remember what it was.  But I do what you've asked about -- I have a US paypal account and a UK paypal account, both linked to their respective bank accounts.  I just transfer money back and forth -- makes recieving monetary gifts very easy -- the family just makes a deposit in my US account and I can transfer it to my UK account via paypal.