MSE News: The pound hits €1.40, should you buy now for the summer?

adindas

benjus wrote: »

I have a basic Euro account in France with Credit Agricole (Britline) registered to my UK address with customer service in English. Costs me €0.60 / month. I don't have a debit card - this would cost about €20 / year extra IIRC. Quite a bit less than the interest you could get on £5000 over a year in a cash ISA - the effective cost of having the money languishing in a Cater Allen account.

I've read on here that DKB bank in Germany offers a free Euro account that can be registered to UK addresses, but haven't verified that.

Just to revive the old Thread about Comdirect Bank (http://www.comdirect.de) and DKB bank ( http://www.dkb.de/index.html) in Germany.

Here is the link of previous discussion
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3741997

I might be traveling to Germany soon and interested in opening any of this account. The advantage of this A/C in comparison to other EUR a/c for UK citizen.residence living inthe UK is that:
DKB for instance
https://www.dkb.de/privatkunden/dkb_cash/
- No fee (most of UK bank EURO account will charge you annual fee as a standard)
- 0.9% interest per year which is decent by EUR AC standard
- Could be used fee free to withdraw money from cash machine worldwide. So If you are in Eurozone in Spain, Greece, France, etc it is the same that you withdraw money in Germany, no fee, no conversion involved. I am not quite sure but I do not think this is a default for any other competing EUR A/C.

Just wonder if anyone has experience to open a EURO account in either of this bank ??

People could take advantage of the strong £/EUR now and lock it at this rate at this euro account.

To optimise first time £/EUR conversion, people could use their Metro / Santander, N&P debit card, Halifax Clarity or Santander Zero creditcard to withdraw cash from Cash machine in Germany and then hand the cash in hand into the cashier at the time of account opening. I am aware that you could use currency brooker to transfer currency from UK to this german account but I do not think it is worthy of consideration if it is less than £2,000 (say) as the receiving bank might also charge you.

Doing this they will always have Euro currency handy to be used when traveling to Eurozone, want to buy item, or pay bill in Euro.

eDicky

benjus wrote: »

In a cash ISA a "few thousand" could earn £100 per year. Used as overpayments on a mortgage it could be worth a lot more. So that's effectively what you're paying in account charges by being forced to keep them in an account just to maintain the account open.

Yes, you are quite right, as you indeed previously pointed out, the requirement for a minimum account balance is effectively a cost when that money could be earning interest elsewhere.

I mentioned the Jersey accounts in case it would be interesting for people who have an income in euros or dollars and need somewhere to pay it in, as in Pincher's example, and also use the same bank to administer their UK affairs in Sterling. I found the debit cards very useful while I was expatriate but now have better alternatives.

And the German euro accounts that pay interest could be useful...

Pincher

Cater Allen is just providing a service for their customers, for which they need to make some money one way or another.


An internet bank in another country? A UK based account has some protection under FSCS, even if Cater Allen is just a name these days.

benjus

Pincher wrote: »

Cater Allen is just providing a service for their customers, for which they need to make some money one way or another.


An internet bank in another country? A UK based account has some protection under FSCS, even if Cater Allen is just a name these days.

I don't generally keep a balance in my French account, but it is covered under the French equivalent of the FSCS: http://www.garantiedesdepots.fr/en

eDicky

adindas wrote: »

I might be traveling to Germany soon and interested in opening any of this account. The advantage of this A/C in comparison to other EUR a/c for UK citizen.residence living inthe UK is that:
DKB for instance
https://www.dkb.de/privatkunden/dkb_cash/
- No fee (most of UK bank EURO account will charge you annual fee as a standard)
- 0.9% interest per year which is decent by EUR AC standard
- Could be used fee free to withdraw money from cash machine worldwide. So If you are in Eurozone in Spain, Greece, France, etc it is the same that you withdraw money in Germany, no fee, no conversion involved. I am not quite sure but I do not think this is a default for any other competing EUR A/C.

Just wonder if anyone has experience to open a EURO account in either of this bank ??

I just tried to open a DKB account online with a UK address, the system accepted everything until the final step, when it announced that they only accept residents of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

With Comdirect as soon as I entered Grossbritannien a flag said that anyone living longer than 180 days per year outside Germany must go to a different route, which sent me around in a kind of circle so I abandoned it.

nourishment

Going back the initial quetsion: "Should I buy now?", I think I should state the obvious...

Depending on how much money you want to convert the slight movement in exchange rate may have litte impact.

At 1.4, £100 gets you 140, at 1.39 it gets you 139 (every .01 move is equivanlent to 1 euros for each £100 you have to exchange.

If you're buying large amounts this can add up but for the average holidayer (incluing myself) it'll make very little difference and not one I'm stressing over for a holiday in August.

That said, if the Euro gains strength between now and then I'll be kicking myself although I'll save money on travel by hopping onto one of those new-fangled flying pigs :rotfl:

agarnett

What's happened to the London Gold Fix in EUR and USD this afternoon ?

I have a spreadsheet which downloads these numbers when I update it and this morning it worked as normal but forty minutes ago this afternoon it went slightly weird:

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨USD¨¨¨¨¨GBP¨¨¨¨EUR¨¨¨EUR/GBP¨USD/GBP
[SIZE=-1]London Gold AM/oz $1,149.00 £782.91 € 1,080.50 1.38010 1.4676
London Gold PM/oz $1,147.25 £782.79 € 2.00 0.00255 1.4656[/SIZE]

USD/GBP numbers were in the right ball park, and I see it has been corrected now, but was the Euro totally revalued for a short period ?? I wonder if anyone benefited


The now corrected table looks like this:
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨USD¨¨¨¨¨GBP¨¨¨¨¨EUR¨¨¨EUR/GBP¨USD/GBP
[SIZE=-1]London Gold AM/oz $1,149.00 £782.91 € 1,080.50 1.38010 1.4676
London Gold PM/oz $1,147.25 £782.79 € 1,081.29 1.38134 1.4656[/SIZE]

For those who are interested the London Silver Fix at midday looked like this:
London Silver/oz $15.47 £10.57 € 14.59 1.38033 1.4637

So, that's alright then, steady as she goes, there's no fix like a London Fix!

agarnett

Hey ho, and up she rises ... er lie in the morning

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨USD¨¨¨¨¨GBP¨¨¨¨EUR¨¨¨EUR/GBP¨USD/GBP
London Gold AM/oz $1,164.00 £781.10 € 1,091.52 1.39741 1.4902

Gold up, pound up ... yer puts yer left leg in, left leg out, in out, in out, shake it all about ... where next ?

zermattbusby

Starting wish Id bought at 140 now (need to change around £1500.00 before the middle of April) What's peoples thoughts /predictions on the near future? Is there any likelihood in a reverse of the recent downward trend?

Thanks

benjus

zermattbusby wrote: »

Starting wish Id bought at 140 now (need to change around £1500.00 before the middle of April) What's peoples thoughts /predictions on the near future? Is there any likelihood in a reverse of the recent downward trend?

Thanks

Without having followed the markets in detail, I'd say this probably had something to do with the drop after the ~1.40 peak: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31967023

I'm not going to try to predict the future, though.