Best bank account to receive lump sum from Germany

duckygee

Hi,

After a bit of advice. My husband is set to 'inherit' money in Germany and we are looking for the best way to get it to the UK without having to pay loads in bank fees. I say 'inherit' as the money wasn't directly left to him, his Auntie was left money and she is giving him some of it (in the region of Euro 30k we are led to believe).

He's already spoken to his accountant, who has said that before trying to move it to the UK, he needs to get a letter from his Auntie explaining that it is a gift, so that he doesn't have to pay tax on it. But assuming he does this, what's the best way to get the money into pounds sterling in a UK bank account, especially as German banks charge for everything?

I did read something about opening a Citibank Euro account here and opening another in Germany, which would then allow him to move money from the German account to the UK account without having to at bank fees because it's all part of the same bank???. Does this sound like an option? And if so, how would he then convert to pound sterling, could he convert the whole account and just hope that the exchange rate was good at the time?

As you can probably tell by the questions, we have no idea how best to do this. But as this money will probably be used as a deposit on a house, we would obviously like to lose as little as possible in getting into a bank account over here.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

benjus

DKB bank is often recommended on here: https://www.dkb.de/int/privatkunden/cash/ww/ - you can open a Euro account with a UK address and pay no fees.

Once you've got the money in your own Euro account, you then have control over how and when to get it over here into Sterling. The cheapest way is likely to be using an FX broker, (e.g. those listed on fxcompared.com ) but you don't really have any protection against something going wrong. The other option would be to inform your bank that an incoming Euro transfer is expected, and see how good a rate you can negotiate with them (if you don't do this they will just apply their standard rate, which will probably be very poor).

duckygee

Thanks benjus, I'll have a look into that.

catokelly

You could use an international money transfer specialist to convert the Euros into Sterling, they will usually hold a Client Euro account, allowing you to transfer Euros directly to their account. Unlike using a bank, they will always let you know the rate before converting your Euros to Pounds and you can choose to book the rate or wait until you get the rate you want - the rate always be much better than using your bank to convert the funds.

Ensure that the company you use is FSA Authorised and well established.

If you do open a Euro account in the UK, you will still have the issue of needing to convert the Euros to GBP at a decent rate, also many banks charge a monthly fee.

grumbler

Any UK bank is likely to charge you~3% for the conversion, possibly plus extra fixed fee for receiving the transfer.

http://www.mycurrencytransfer.com/money-transfer-to-UK/10000-EUR

If it's a very big amount you can do this in chunks to reduce the risk.

benjus wrote: »

Once you've got the money in your own Euro account, you then have control over how and when to get it over here into Sterling.

However, it's unlikely that you'll avoid paying for the international bank transfer.

benjus

grumbler wrote: »

However, it's unlikely that you'll avoid paying for the international bank transfer.

If you'd quoted the rest of my paragraph it would be obvious that I didn't suggest you could avoid it. Other posters on here have reported successfully negotiating a rate with their bank before transferring the money, thereby getting an exchange rate approaching that of an FX broker with the security of a bank. While this may not work for the OP, it's certainly worth a try, rather than either accepting a bad exchange rate from the bank or going to all the hassle of splitting the transfer into small sums to mitigate the risk of using an FX broker.