Should I 'SELL' my GBP for USD?

scottie69

Hello guys,

Do you know of any banks based in the UK that let you open an account in US dollars?

I am thinking of converting my GB£ savings into US dollars.

Thanks for any info.

Aegis

I know that HSBC do, onshore, offshore or in a county with the currency you're looking for (i.e. the US in this case). However, opening these accounts is likely to incur a fee unless you are one of the Premier customers. A standard onshore currency account costs about £3 a month if memory serves, while offshore has a minimum balance and the international account opening service costs £100 for regular customers.

I don't know if other banks offer similar services or what their charges are.

Be careful when trying to play the forex market. The pound has recently dropped against the dollar, but there's no guarantee that it will continue to do so, so you might actually end up making the situation worse. This is further exacerbated by the fact that your transaction costs to convert sterling to dollars and back again could easily run to 10% when you include the buy/sell spread.

Loco

Citi bank are the only other ones i can think of

adecor

Depends how much you're talking about - if substantial then you can use one of the fx brokers, but you won't earn any interest & should they go broke you're not covered.

gozomark

$ :£ is about 1.38 -

what rate do you think it can go to ?
what will you do if it actually goes to 1.50 ?

how much of your money (%age wise) are you prepared to lose ?

newsaver2008

I am with HSBC in Turkey. I converted most of my savings to dollars from sterling because I had to as I wanted to invest in eurobonds and they do not have sterling eurobonds. The rate I got last Tuesday was 1.3980 and the next day it dropped 3 cents I saw. I don't have to pay anything to maintin the account extra as it's not an offshore account and I am a Turkish resident but of course I had to pay the commission for changing the money. I picked a bad time for changing a large sum but in the next few days it went even worse and I did not know how long or by how much and more importantly WHEN sterling would rally and meanwhile I wanted to invest the money to get an income from it.
If I was still living in the UK I wouldn't have done this simply to get out of the pound because, as the others on this forum say, it is not a given that the pound will continue to drop against the $ and I changed it in order to buy an investment in dollars.

gozomark

gozomark wrote: »

$ :£ is about 1.38 -

what rate do you think it can go to ?
what will you do if it actually goes to 1.50 ?

how much of your money (%age wise) are you prepared to lose ?

its almost at 1.50 now (1.493) - I hope you didn't do anything, as you would now be losing around 10% including the dealing costs......

your email was posted on the very day £ hit bottom v the $ - panic investment decisions rarely work...
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/fds/hi/business/market_data/currency/11/12/one_month.stm