Sending Money Overseas article discussion

winter100

jonesMUFCforever wrote: »

I would have thought that depositing money into a National savings account and then immediately asking them to transfer them abroad would ring alarm bells in their compliance security team and they might block the account?

I wasn't thinking of depositing and immediately transferring the money would remain there for a period of time and it is coming from a local government pension.
I was looking at if anyone had used this service before and what their experience was and were the exchange rates competitive with currency exchange services such as moneycorp or xe.com. I was also interested as I assume as it is National Savings you would have far greater protection than the commercial alternatives.

grumbler

winter100 wrote: »

...I was looking at ...were the exchange rates competitive with currency exchange services such as moneycorp or xe.com.

I would guess that they make the transfer in ££, and it's the recipient bank that makes the conversion.
For UK banks it's typical to charge 2.5-3% for this.

colsten

winter100 wrote: »

I have been looking at leaving some savings in National Savings before moving abroad, they have an international payments service with no fee.

They won't charge you for making the transfer but how does their exchange rate compare with that of currency transfer specialists, such as Transferwise?

winter100 wrote: »

I was also interested as I assume as it is National Savings you would have far greater protection than the commercial alternatives

Whilst your money is in your UK banks account, it's guaranteed up to £85K. NS&I doesn't have an upper limit. Neither a bank nor NS&I, nor a transfer service, will protect you from falling for a scammer. If the recipient does a runner with your money, you are on your own.

If you pay the money to yourself, or if you know the recipient is reliable, money transfers are fine. I would never use them to e.g. pay for a holiday villa a private person is advertising as the risk is too great.

tim119

Any Expat any experience of sending money from Saudi Arabia back to the UK?
I can either send SAR, Dollars. or Euros, these are my only options.
I am currently using transferwise, and was wondering if i could save money again by using a different company?
appox send could be around £25,000 every 6 months.

Consumerist

tim119 wrote: »

. . . I am currently using transferwise, and was wondering if i could save money again by using a different company?
appox send could be around £25,000 every 6 months.

You could try the <monito> comparison site to compare costs.

53balham

I have a Pockit account and they have been offering international transfers for about two weeks now. Their fees for all their services are 99p and it is the same for international transfers. The rates have also been competitive so would recommend using it. Anyone else used them?

eDicky

53balham wrote: »

I have a Pockit account and they have been offering international transfers for about two weeks now. Their fees for all their services are 99p and it is the same for international transfers. The rates have also been competitive so would recommend using it. Anyone else used them?

Please give an example of the 'competitive' rate to euros today, as it is not revealed until a transfer is made.

53balham

eDicky wrote: »

Please give an example of the 'competitive' rate to euros today, as it is not revealed until a transfer is made.

I tried money gram before using pockit just to compare and they charged 3% on the euro rate but pockit was half a percent

eDicky

53balham wrote: »

I tried money gram before using pockit just to compare and they charged 3% on the euro rate but pockit was half a percent

That's meaningless. Please give Pockit's exchange rate in figures, with the time and date, in order to make a real assessment.

cha73

Hi,

I'm new to the thread so apologies if this has been covered already.

I need to send a few hundred pounds to Ireland, I checked with my banks and they have fees ranging from £12 to £25 so I was looking at PayPal as an option. From looking at their site, the fee would be only 0.4% as long as the account has enough funds to cover the transfer amount.

However I'm not sure how competitive their exchange rates are, does anyone know if they are competitive? If they are competitive then Paypal would seem to be a decent option?

EDIT: on further investigation it would seem that Paypal also has a fixed fee of €0.35 and a currency conversion fee of 2.5% (the 0.4% I mentioned above is a cross border fee). So based on this new information, these fees combined would seem to make Paypal a bad option!

So I've been looking at Azimo, Western Union, OFX etc. Comparing with mycurrencytransfer.com Western Union & TransferWise seem competitive, does anyone here have experience of these companies - are there any hidden fees or will I get what they promise?

Any thoughts or other suggestions welcome.

Thanks