Best way to receive Euros

Hairysmiley

Hi,
Does anyone know the cheapest way to receive Euros from abroad?
My Dad is giving me part of my inheritance early and wants to send me £160,000 but in Euros.
If anyone has any tips I'd be very grateful.
Thanks,

HS

PenguinJim

Don't use a bank transfer. Use an international currency transfer company such as UKForex (that's an example and not a recommendation - I have not used them).

This should avoid fees and get a significantly better exchange rate.

bowlhead99

You can set up a Euro account with someone like Citibank relatively easily. Or maybe your own highstreet bank (or international affiliate), but many of them have quite limited services or high transaction fees / account maintenance fees.

Once the money is under your control, you can, at your leisure, decide how much to change into sterling and when. For doing this, shop around and use a specialist FX broker or money service to get the best rate possible (not a travelex-type holiday money specialist that has a 10-20% spread between their buying and selling prices). You send them your Euros from your Euro account and they send you back GBP.

IMHO, it's likely the Euro rate might continue to drift from the current 1.26 rate up to the 1.27, 1.28 range or higher over the summer and so there would be an argument for exchanging it all sooner rather than later, so at least you have converted your money into the currency that all your expenses are likely to be in going forward and you know what you have. However you might like to gamble that rates will go back to 1.15 before they go up to 1.35, and speculate for a bit of profit. I would not recommend that because it's just a gamble.

But I think the first step is to just set up a Euro account and have him electronically send the funds and you receive them in Euro. You can then decide what proportion of the Eur 200k you want to take as GBP and how much you might like to keep in Euros for future European holidays to see family etc, and where and when to do the conversion.

Alternatively you could get your Dad to shop around for a competitive conversion at his end and send you sterling - but if he wants to send Euros you will get a much better rate from a currency specialist than just letting your GBP bank account receive and translate the incoming cash at some automatic uncompetitive rate.

When I'm doing fx conversions for myself it's generally only on a few hundreds or thousands here or there, and so I sometimes use a cheap and easy service like XE Trade with a rate about 1.5% worse than the official mid-market rate, rather than a bank at 2%+, but I don't shop around much more than that - a whole percent on £1k is only a tenner. But if you're shifting 100k, you should be able to find a much lower spread because you're no longer in the 'tourist' market and a broker can go out and give you a specific quote from the market plus whatever he takes as spread.