Transferring house sale proceeds in Spain back to the UK?

RockVacirca

What is the best way to transfer house sale funds back to the UK?

My neighbours have just sold their small villa for 150K euro and the money is in their lawyer's client account. They need to send it back to the UK, and convert it into UKP. They approached their bank here, Barclays, who wanted 700 euro just to pay it into their account! They closed their Barclays account and opened one with Sabadel who said they will charge them nothing to pay in the euro cheque.

My questions are:

1. Should they get their lawyer to transfer the money from the client account to a UK bank?

2. Or should they ask for a cheque and bring that cheque back to the UK, and pay it into a UK bank account?

3. Or should they take that cheque to a bank in Spain, or a service such as Moneycorp, and get them to transfer the money?

They don't want to get ripped off with bank charges and lousy exchange rates, so what is the advice guys?

steampowered

Please CHECK THE EXCHANGE RATE. Not just the fees!

Options 1 and 2 are bad ideas. These involve the lawyer's bank or your bank doing the conversion. Most banks will give you a very poor exchange rate. The cost of doing it this way could easily be in the thousands.

Use a specialist currency broker. The way it works is that you pay the Euros into the broker's Spanish account, and they then pay you £ in the UK.

When I lived abroad I used https://www.clearfx.co.uk and thought they were brilliant. I don't know whether they offer the best rates on a sum as large as EUR 150k.

eddddy

I'd agree with steampowered. You can phone a few brokers to get quotes - i.e. "If I pay you EUR150k today, how many GBP would I get transferred to my account?"

i.e. Just get a "bottom line" number rather than working out ex-rates fees etc.

If you like a quote, often you can "book it" - then it becomes guaranteed for a few days. (But then you can't back out, without paying a fee.)

Take a look here: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/foreign-currency-exchange and scroll down to "Sending larger amounts (£5,000+)"

Barter

When we sold up in France I used currencyfair.com - it worked well and gave a very good exchange rate.

dgtazzman

I spread money over 2 or 3 brokers when I moved to the UK from the Netherlands. Got good rates and their fees were like a quarter of what Lloyds wanted to do it...

2 had funds in my UK account next day, the last took 2 working days.

knightstyle

We have used Currencies Direct to transfer money to and from abroad, very straightforward and a better rate than using a bank.
Just be aware that using them or similar agencies means that your money is not protected as it would be using the bank.
So perhaps make several transfers waiting for one to arrive before arranging the next which is what we have done after hearing about Crown Currency which went broke.

MRBE

I would highly recommend transferwise.com.
They give mid market rate - fast service. Have never had a problem transferring big amounts from overseas.

Therefore I would
1) Pay check into a local account in Euros
2) Open an account on transferwise.com
3) Send to their account in UK.

wham bam thank you ma'am.

Never use the bank to transfer internationally! The lack of fee is hidden in the embarrassingly appalling exchange rate.