best option to send money

[scotty 0]

Hi everyone, up until now I have always used my bank to transfer money over to the states now I am ready to transfer a fairly large amount,would it be better to go through a financial co like this one

http://www.currencysolutions.co.uk/

where they give you a higher exchange rate. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Regards Scotty

[munchkins 0]

In all honesty Ssotty, we have looked at all options and have decided that we are in the end going with our bank, which is Nat West. WE checked everything out and the way the Nat West do it is, once you have all your cash accumulated in your account, i.e house sale, investments cashed etc. they willphone their foreign department there and then and get you the best possible exchange rate. If it is over £10,000 it is treated as a large business type amount and therefore they do not quote you on "tourist rates"

When we were checking this out the teller checked for us the actual rate that they were prepared to offer us and it was over the actual rate being quoted on the business exchange site so we knew it would have been a good deal. At the time of the figure being given you have about 30 seconds to make up your mind because of the speed that the exchange rate changes in the market place.

The fee that was quoted to us was £18.00 and that was for transferring well over £125,000 and for an extra £20.00 they would have got it into out US account the following day, that is great to my way of thinking

Also we considered the companys who say they pay higher than the high street banks, but I have not found this to be so as I also checked out Lyods TSB who would have given us a good deal if we had transferred all out cash to them (not as good as Nat WEst though) and at the end of the day we didn't "know them" Hubby is fanatical when it comes to trusting people with our money!!!

Check out who you have your account with first - you can always negotiate, I am sure.

[Jasman0717 9]

I used Western Union just to get Claudeth money but when I went back in March for a visit I had opened up a savings account linked to my regular account so gave her an ATM. The transfer cost went from over $30 to about $1.50

[mawilson 2,133]

You could beam it up, scotty.

[rosyanne 0]

West union might be the fastest...?!

[Euro 3]

You could beam it up, scotty.

0ops forgot so EDITING...............My UK bank (HSBC) transfered the cash to my UK bank account!!...it cost about $12

Edited February 10, 2006 by euro

[RichJ 0]

I believe that www.xetrade.com is about as competitive as you can get.

It's very hard to compare between exchange rates due to the variety of charging through commission, one-time charges, rate variations. What I have heard is that banks are never any good compared to the specialist foreign trade houses like xetrade. I'd be interested to know what 'effective rate' someone who recently did an exchange got. By effective rate I mean:

Number of dollars received after all charges

divided by

total amount of £ handed over including charges, commission etc

[munchkins 0]

Rchj

when we were making enquiries (see my reply above) the teller telephoned as we were stood with her and asked for the best rate they could give us at that time. As I have said you then have 30 seconds to make up your mind if you want that rate. At the time the tourist rates stood at $1.65, the business rate was $1.76 and they offered us $1.78.and al they would have taken from us was an £18.00 admin fee ( we had to be transferring more than £10.000) and our money would be in our US bank in 4 days. If we wanted a 1/2 day transfer it would cost an extra £20, and nothing more. which I consider pretty good

We had also done a similar excercise with one of the "specialist " companies and in all honesty they were only on the same level ( in fact slightly less) and then we did not see the point of transferring all our money into that company, only for them to transfer it back out again!!

[RichJ 0]

That's very interesting to know, thanks. Can you tell me which day you got that rate? It would also be interesting to know the precise result of the 'effective rate' calculation.

[ladybutterfly 0]

I would open up a paypal account at www.paypal.com, its free to set up and you can add your bank account onto it so you can transfer the money from paypal to your bank.