Transferring Money abroad bit-by-bit

siber

Hi Moneysavers.

I have a plan and would like to run it past you. I am imminently planning to emigrate to start a new job, and have been thinking about the best way to transfer my money into my new currency without paying significant fees.

I have a Halifax Clarity credit card which is load-free for foreign exchange, and also does not charge a fee for withdrawing my money from an ATM abroad.

Therefore, if I up my daily cash withdrawal limit, can I simply withdraw cash abroad, find an internet connection and pay-off my balance online the same day to avoid any exchange charges? If possible (I need to check) I guess I could pre-pay the credit card account to avoid any possibility of being charged interest?

If this is feasible, the only unknown is finding out whether banks/cash machines abroard ALSO make a charge to provide cash to a foreign cardholder. This may skew my calculations.

I haven't looked into it that much so far, but I understand that to go through a currency broker, I'm going to have to pay between 0.5% and 1.5% fees to change money and deliver it to a foreign bank account.

Any advice or criticisms appreciated! :money:

Cheers,

Siber

agrinnall

Yes, you can do your first suggestion, paying off the withdrawal as soon as it's made to avoid interest charges. However, you can't load the card in advance, and you might need to be a bit careful with the timing of the payments, so rather than doing the transaction on the day of the withdrawal, use online banking to make sure that the transaction has registered on the credit card account before transferring the money. You might end up paying a very small amount of interest but that's better than having your card cancelled while you still have money in the UK.

BillJones

You are unlikely to get a great exchange rate via this method. You'll need to check out how much that will be costing you.

jonesMUFCforever

There was a thread last year where someone thought that you could only withdraw up to 50% of your limit as cash in a rolling 12 month period.
If true this could trip you up.

Biggles

BillJones wrote: »

You are unlikely to get a great exchange rate via this method. You'll need to check out how much that will be costing you.

The withdrawals will be at the best possible exchange rate, as it's a Clarity card. And, as the plan is moving the money out of the country, I assume the card repayments will be from the UK current account from which he is moving his money, so no exchange rate applies there.

chattychappy

BillJones wrote: »

You are unlikely to get a great exchange rate via this method. You'll need to check out how much that will be costing you.

The rate will be excellent, unless the country concerned is one that has some kind of weird currency controls (in which case a bank transfer might be equally as bad).

There is, perhaps, the risk that Halifax will close the account after a while because it will be loss making. Also it might get blocked from time-to-time. I've used Santander Zero in a similar way for a few years now - mainly overseas ATM withdrawals, mostly without a problem.

Depending on the receiving country, there may be AML issues if cash is regularly paid in. I would keep the Halifax statements as evidence of where the money came from. Also it might look like undeclared cash income.