I am living abroad and while I'm not truly poor, a couple of months ago I had less that £20 to my name, so I'm quite cost conscious.

I needed to send some money overseas and I looked at bitcoin for exactly the same reasons that you described. However, I found that sending the money via bit coin would take longer and wind up costing me more in transaction fees than just using transferwise. While the actual bitcoin transfer itself was free and instantaneous, there were multiple days of waiting and percentage fees to convert from or to fiat currency at each end of the transaction.