Sending Money Overseas article discussion

lockey

hi i was wondering if anyone can help, i have a mortgage with the denizbank in turkey and need to send payment in sterling each month which at the moment is costing me £25 a time. my account here is santander and i was wondering if there was a cheaper alternative without changing bank accounts and it as to be sterling that is sent. thank you in advance for any suggestions

Isatou

Can anyone advise me on the cheapest and quickest way to send £700 to Australia? Thanks

knightstyle

lockey, I have used a € cheque in the past. Santander charge £10 a time for them. How about paying two months at a time as well?

hodman-29

The cheapest way I have found of transferring money abroad is by not doing so! I will explain. As the article explained, there are quite a few charges involved. Moneybookers may not have high charges but I bet they make up for that on the spread (difference between buy and sell rate)! If you are not getting close to the Interbank rate then it's costing you a lot.
Say you had a mate in the country you want the money to be in and they wanted money in your country. You could get them to put money in your foreign bank account or ask them to pay the bill. And you could do the same for them. OK so one charge is gone because you don't pay anything to transfer the money inside a country. And the exchange rate. Well just look up the Interbank rate and agree something between the buy and sell rate. You both win!!
But this is a bit complicated cos you might not have a mate in the country you want to transfer funds to and the amount you want to exchange might not be the same as theirs.
Well the answer is CurrencyFair. They have set up a system where the basis of the transfer is by people in different countries. So the rates are fantastic and the transfer charges are very small - you have to upload your money into a secure, segregated Bank of America client account (means no one can touch the money) and money has to be transferred into the foreign account you designate so there are some charges (€3).
On their website you can see the live rates so you know exactly what you will get - try that on a lot of other sites!!!
They are based in Ireland and they are regulated as an 'Authorised Payments Institution' - but always check on the security of your money whatever the bank.
Yes they are there to make a profit but when I have checked anywhere else no one has ever beat them - and I've been doing this for a couple of years.

morganlefay

Sorry, idiot question since reading this thread has confused me. I need to send around 300 Euros to a friend in France who is adamant that she doesn't want a cheque. Looking on here most of the methods discussed seem too sophisticated, and in any case what she is demanding is crisp notes in her hand, not a pre-loaded card or any other cunning plan. I think my best option is to take a paperback, interleave some of the pages with Euro notes and post it.
Can anyone come up with a better solution for this sort of level of payment ?

Zorz_2

morganlefay wrote: »

Can anyone come up with a better solution for this sort of level of payment ?

Just send an international payment to her account. You will need her account's IBAN, the banks BIC and her name. Your bank will charge you a fee, her bank may (or may not) charge a small fee too so you have to take that into account (get her to ask her bank about this). Overall cost is typically about 10 pounds.

It's safer, probably faster and you will get a better exchange rate than actually obtaining euro notes, so that will offset a lot of the fees paid.

Or, if you have both Paypal, you can do it that way.

ginjen

To anyone thinking of using a currency tfr. service - a word of warning. I used xe.com to tfr. £20,000 from OZ to UK and it turned into a nightmare. Money was due to hit bank account in UK on a Friday - it didnt arrive - I tried on the saturday to contact xe.com by email but no reply - I then phoned them in Canada (their HQ) and couldnt get a satisfactory reply - I had to wait till the monday to get my mother in OZ to go to the bank in person and find out what had happened - bank said they'd trfd. the money to XE's OZ account - XE's office was in a different OZ city - more phone calls, and no reply just an answerphone! I then phone XE in Canada again and finally on the tuesday, they say because the amount transferred was 'exactly £20,000' they couldn't verify it was mine as many people transfer 'that amount' On wednesday, after a near nervous breakdown and enless hassle, money hit my UK account! Never again! All this to save £120. It's just not worth the risk - use a bank and avoid any hassle.

edwardmluk

I want to send €100 to croatia as a deposit on a apartment for a holiday. I bank with Natwest who want to charge me £20 for the pleasure. Is there a cheaper way? The recipient doesn't have paypal (I think) so I presume I'm stuck with this extortionate (in relation to the total transaction) price?

RetiredInThailand

For small sums like that Moneybookers is useful, though they are putting their exchange weighting up to an eye-watering 2.5% very soon which makes them no better than most credit cards. The actual fee they charge for the transfer is low though.

catokelly

ginjen wrote: »

Never again! All this to save £120. It's just not worth the risk - use a bank and avoid any hassle.

That is the worst thing, you must have been mega stressed! I reckon you probably saved more than £120 using XE though? I have used banks for transfers in the past but their rates are terrible and got sick of talking to people in call centres whenever i had a query.

I now use Thomas Exchange www.thomasexchange.co.uk you can pay instore or online, so is very straight forward. The transfer rates are always better than the banks and they offer better rates for larger amounts if you ring/email them or go to one of their london offices. They charge £12 fee or no fee if transferring over £5000.

You can also move money back to the UK through them, if you have a bank account abroad and they then convert the Euros/Dollars etc back into sterling for you (I found out to my expense if you transfer directly from a bank account abroad to your UK bank, the banks convert the funds back to sterling at really bad rates). I might check out xe though, out of curiosity has anyone else used xe?