Inheritance money in Ireland - transferring to UK

daniellejwilson

I hope you are all well and wondered if you might be able to help? Sadly, my mother in law passed away in 2018, she lived in Ireland, I and my OH live in England. Probate has just been issued and we have just had the distribution of account. There is about 80k euros to be transferred to my other half, we are also looking to sell her house over the next few months. It’s still very painful for my OH so I intend to do as much of the leg work as I can.

I have been researching various ways of transferring the money and wanted to pick your brains. As far as I understand he’ll need an Irish bank account to have these funds transferred into, I have been looking at  N26 – any thoughts about this?

I have also been reading about foreign exchange brokers to have the money transferred out of Euros into Sterling. However, most banks have a maximum withdrawal limit (set per month/day) N26’s is 30k dollars. Is this the correct understanding?

Is there any other way of transferring the money into sterling whilst not losing too much to fee’s/currency conversation. This is all very new to me, we’ve never had this much money to move around.

Any other hints/tips/reading, would be much appreciated.

Thank you all in advance.

xylophone

https://www.starlingbank.com/current-account/euro-bank-account/

is the above of interest?

daniellejwilson

xylophone said:

https://www.starlingbank.com/current-account/euro-bank-account/

is the above of interest?

Thank you, that does look very interesting, i'll investigate further. 

Daliah

N26 no longer offer accounts to UK residents. Starling and/or Wise would be my choice, where Wise do not offer FSCS protections.

Also beware, Starling are charging negative interest on anything above 50,000 Euros

maxsteam

Fineco is worth a look too, in my opinion.

https://finecobank.co.uk/public/

It's an Italian bank which will allow UK residents to open accounts where you can deposit, hold and withdraw euros, pounds, dollars, etc. and exchange between the currencies at far better rates than with a UK retail bank. The account also provides access to various investments, some or which are risky so you would need to approach some of the account options with caution.

Thrugelmir

Why not ask the executors of the Estate to transfer the money directly to the UK?  For the proceeds from the house sale ask the solicitors handling the transaction. 

daniellejwilson

Thrugelmir said:

Why not ask the executors of the Estate to transfer the money directly to the UK?  For the proceeds from the house sale ask the solicitors handling the transaction. 

Would the exchange rate be bad this way? 

daniellejwilson

Thank you all so much, I called currencies direct and key currency this evening and they can transfer directly from the solicitors, via their exchange rates into an English/Sterling bank account (as described here: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/foreign-currency-exchange/) what do you think about that way of getting the money over? 

maxsteam

daniellejwilson said:

Thank you all so much, I called currencies direct and key currency this evening and they can transfer directly from the solicitors, via their exchange rates into an English/Sterling bank account (as described here: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/foreign-currency-exchange/) what do you think about that way of getting the money over? 

My preference would be to stick with banks. You could open a Fineco account (or a Starling account?), ask for the euros to be transfered into it and lose nothing. You could then exchange the euros for pounds and lose about 0.6% (this is with Fineco, I don't know about Starling). With a mainstream bank, you might lose up to 5%. With a high street currency dealer, you need to decide if you trust them. If they do a PermierFX on you, you could lose everything.

PremierFX are one of the more recent currency exchange companies to fail but there have been others.

The simplest way would be just to ask the solicitors to transfer directly into a mainstream UK bank account but you would lose perhaps 3 or 5% due to their currency exchange rates.

maxsteam

I've just come across this site. I am sure that there will be other similar comparison sites

https://www.monito.com/send-money/ireland/united-kingdom/eur/gbp/80000

I've also logged into Fineco to see how many pounds you'd get for €80000 there and they say £68064. The best on the above site at the moment was Currency Solutions Ltd who said £68070. Obviously the rates change minute by minute so a more meaningful comparison might be to look at the spread. As stated, for such a large sum, my preference would be to stick with banks rather than use a currency exchange company even if it costs a little more. I have used currency exchange companies when working overseas to transfer part of my salary back to the UK but I would not use them for a life-changing amount.

bostonerimus

Who is the executor? Surely it has to be someone like a lawyer with an Irish bank account who can pay bills. When my mum died in the UK her executor was her solicitor and he simply did an electronic bank transfer to me in the US.