International Wire Transfers: Question

[ceejay74]

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone has to regularly transfer money from the U.S. into a foreign bank account. If so, do you know a cheap way to do it?

My husband has a UK bank account to which his rental checks come in and from which his mortgage and credit card payments are automatically debited.

His rental income doesn't cover all his payments, so we need to start putting more money in there to keep it from overdrawing. However, my bank will charge me $50 for each international wire transfer. I need to do this at least every couple months and would prefer to do it once a month, but at those prices I'm going to have to save up as much as I can to do in lump sums!

Any advice?
thanks!
CJ

[rebeccae55]

Other than shopping banks, I'm not sure. My bank charges $45 for international wires.

[neatdesign]

I have never used it, but take a look at XE Trade.

You might also try searching the posts at BritishExpats.com -- this kind of question comes up from time to time there. Oh, and also the BritishExpats' Wiki page on US Finances.

~ Jenney

ps. My DH's a British expat, so I'm a regular over there

[scfr]

This isn't what you asked, but what about closing that particular credit card and opening up both a cc and bank account here in the USA? [That would mean less frequent transfers needed.]

International wire transfers aren't cheap. My bank does offer a significantly better exchange rate if you are transferring the equivalent of $10,000 or more at a time, which might be another incentive to save up and do one lump sum transfer.

[ceejay74]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look on that expat site and see if they know of any cheap, reputable money-transfer services. Long-term, transferring the balances would be the better option. He has really fantastic rates (1.2%), so I'll have to calculate whether $50 a month on balance transfers added on to that is better or worse than the best fixed rate I could get (probably more like 8%).

Thanks again!
CJ

[CRFSaver]

Paypal. They can do cross border movements and though I have not priced it up it suppsed to be extremely competative.