Paying money into a Spanish account

cmjspencer

Hi Guys

I am new to these forums so please be nice...

My father in law has a spanish property which he pays the mortgage from a spanish bank account. The problem however, is that he pays money from his English bank account into the Spanish one monthly to cover the mortgage. His English bank charge him £20 a month to transfer the money. Obviously this is putting another £20 per month on his mortgage payment. I was just wondering if anyone knows of any way around paying these Euro transfer charges? Someone did mention a website called interchange that might be able to help, but I have never heard of it and was wondering if this company would be suitable?

Any help would be great

Thanks

Chris

PBA

Not sure if this would help, but Abbey now do Spanish mortgages through their parent company. They don't charge for the transfers to make the monthly repayments.

maizie_moo

I too have a Spanish property and I have just opened a Halifax Xtra account in Spain. This allows me free transfers from my current account into it to pay direct debits and withdraw cash using a debit card. They will also provide a cheque book, but I understand cheques are not used much in Spain.

Hope this helps

innovate

Check out Moneybookers . I find them unbeatable in terms of exchange rates and charges for transferring money between UK and Euro bank accounts.

The Exchange rates are pretty close to the ECB rates - something no bank I know of matches, and the charge per withdrawal is €1.80/£1.30ish. Bottom line you can save some £20 or more per transaction - £240 per annum if you do a transaction a month!

On the downside: their Customer Service is extremely slow, but with a bit of following wind, you might not need them at all. There is also a transfer limit of some £18K in any 60 day period. You need to allow a clear 5-7 working days(*) for a transfer to complete end-to-end, and obviously you need to set up transfers yourself. Manual effort can be reduced if you use Standing Orders for regular payments.

You are only allowed one MB account per person but you can use one account to transfer UKP ---> Euro and Euro ----> UKP.

(*) transfer times should reduce as UK bank transfer times will be reduced to hours rather than days over the next 12-18 months. Most of the current transfer time is taken up by the time it takes to send your money from your UK account to the MB Lloyds London account. The Euro-end in France, Germany and Austria takes a day - sorry, have no experience with Spain, a "siesta" factor may well exist there, but I doubt it.

LesD

cmjspencer wrote:

His English bank charge him £20 a month to transfer the money.

Has he also found that his Spanish bank charge him to RECEIVE the money??? A trick of the Spanish banking system that hopefully the UK banks don't pick up on!!!

The Halifax system mentioned earlier (including Bank of Scotland) eliminates ALL charges providing you keep 600EUR in the account and the exchange rate used is pretty competitive (certainly for significant payments). We have a Spanish property and have found the facilities first rate. It includes on-line access and a debit card allowing free cash withdrawals.

We have not found a problem with the Halifax cheques in Spain.

jonesMUFCforever

Quote from LesD
Has he also found that his Spanish bank charge him to RECEIVE the money??? A trick of the Spanish banking system that hopefully the UK banks don't pick up on!!!


Most banks already charge for receiving money from abroad and have done for donkey's years