Bringing overseas inheritance money into the UK

ralphaverbuch

My wife recently lost her mum. My wife was born in the USA but has been living in Europe for most of her adult life (21 years in the UK). She's fortunate to be receiving $190k from her late mum's USA estate and any tax is already paid in the country. Now we are looking at the most cost-effective way to bring the dollars into the UK as sterling. 

My best guess is that someting like Wise is our best bet in keeping forex costs to a minimum but even then it's around £150 as a fee. This actually seems very reasonable but what I'm not 100% confident about is whether they are offering the best exchange rate or also make a further margin on this by not being quite so competitive (much as the foreign exchange kiosks do at the airports for example). 

Anyway, my inclination is to go with Wise's solution, not least because we already have an account of many years, but I wanted to do a reality check in case othes have been down a similar route.

Cheers

Ralph

mebu60

Wise usually work out amongst the best on overall conversion rate. £150 to receive c£146k seems pretty reasonable! Also you already have a Wise account so no hassle in setting up with someone new. 

ralphaverbuch

Yeah ... just doing a wee bit of reality checking before I flip the switch. Interestingly sending from USD to GBP seems to be more expensive. Nearly $700 to bring the cash across into sterling.

nottsphil

ralphaverbuch said:

Interestingly sending from USD to GBP seems to be more expensive. Nearly $700 to bring the cash across into sterling.

More expensive than what?

Bostonerimus1

Wise gets good reviews. International wire transfers between banks sometimes have lower fees, but worse exchange rates making them more expensive overall, but they are convenient.

fifeken

I've never done the arithmetic for US$ transactions, but I've read that the Wise spread is much tighter on them than other currencies and the amount at which a Swift transfer is cheaper is much lower than it would be for GBP.

If the sender can do a Swift transfer with reasonable fees throughout then it may well work out cheaper overall. You have to do the sums.

ralphaverbuch

nottsphil said:

ralphaverbuch said:

Interestingly sending from USD to GBP seems to be more expensive. Nearly $700 to bring the cash across into sterling.

More expensive than what?

Sorry... going GBP to USD versus USD to GBP.

Ralph