Foreign cash saving

WolfUK

xylophone wrote: »

Anything here?

https://www.compareholidaymoney.com/sell-currency/swiss-francs.php

Very useful link thanks. I found one similar but this has more options. Now need to find one that takes 1000 notes

zerog

The problem isn't about bringing it into the UK. Loads of people bring sums in excess of €10000 and most of them don't get caught. The risk of getting caught is priced into the remuneration that these money mules receive. But this is beside the point, as you didn't break the law and the money is here now.

The issue is that if you try to exchange more than around £2000 worth of currency in either direction (that is, to or from sterling), bureaux de change will ask you for paperwork to explain the source of the cash. Do you have the inheritance paperwork?


Anyway, my controversial opinion is that I would just keep the cash, and use it for nice holidays to Switzerland in the future. I would only exchange it to pounds in an absolute emergency where all my bank accounts were empty and I would have to start selling my possessions in order to survive,

If you exchange 10000 francs now you will get about £7500.

If this had happened 5 years ago you would have received £6500.

If you did this 10 years ago you would have received £5500.

15 years ago - £4500.

30 years ago - £4000

40 years ago - £2500

50 years ago - £1000

150 years ago - £400 (none of these figures have been adjusted for inflation)

The Swiss do not want their currency to keep appreciating, but that's what they said when it was £1 to 2 francs.

Furthermore as of a few months ago, the Swiss central bank changed its longstanding policy where its banknotes expire every 40-50 years and need to be replaced.

The Bank of England does something similar, it replaces its cash every 15 years or so, but previous issues are exchangeable forever. In Switzerland this was not the case until very recently - basically if you had banknotes from the 1970s, they stopped being used in 2000 and had to be exchanged to newer series at the central bank by April 2020, but they have now removed the time limit.

If you had the series of notes used from 2000-2018, they were probably going to become worthless in 2040, but this will not happen any more. You most likely have the latest series which was released in the past 2-3 years so if there was going to be a problem it would not really arise until about 2060, but it isn't going to happen at all now.

Although potentially very few people if any will be using cash for payments in 2060, but I think Switzerland will be one of the last holdouts.

Flobberchops

The other option would be to open a foreign currency account with a UK bank, deposit the cash, and you can exchange it to Sterling piecemeal and/or when rates are favourable. Barclays and HSBC, for example.

xylophone

Had she kept the cash under a mattress rather than in a bank account?

Considering prices the last time I went to Switzerland, it was probably in her wallet for next week's shopping....:)

WolfUK

Flobberchops wrote: »

The other option would be to open a foreign currency account with a UK bank, deposit the cash, and you can exchange it to Sterling piecemeal and/or when rates are favourable. Barclays and HSBC, for example.

I’m a Premier bank account holder with HSBC already so this might be an option. If it was euros I already have a European bank account so again that would not have been issued Swiss francs though....

Jonbvn

xylophone wrote: »

Considering prices the last time I went to Switzerland, it was probably in her wallet for next week's shopping....:)

This is so true. I used CHF1000 for a round of drinks in Geneva a few years back and they didn't even blink.

Jonbvn

Jonbvn wrote: »

This is so true. I used CHF1000 for a round of drinks in Geneva a few years back and they didn't even blink.

I might add I did get a change