Hi Guys and Gals,

I had a trawl around wiki first, but could not fine my answer.....but:

Who do you use for money exchange?

As we are getting closer, I am tracking the exchange rate on XE.com, but the broker I was told to use (Halo Financial), told me I will never actually get the rate you see on the likes of XE, which then defetes the object of tracking it!!:curse:

I understand about 'locking in the rate', BUT.....who do you use and what rate monitor do you use.

Am I to expect the rate I see or is there a rule of thumb?

Hope you can help?

Chris.

no-one will give you that rate, read the exchange rate thread it explains it all.

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=442788

Chris

Most of the companies are the same and seem to offer the same rates. Hifx seem very good and have been used by several of my clients. They have not had a problem and got the money over very quickly. In one case my client did not have phone and so I was the link between the two. It was a personal service which worked well. I dealt with Jonathan Sermon, let him know I sent you.

Helen

For our FX needs we use Custom House They are a Canadian company with offices in the UK as well. We give our broker a target rate and they buy/sell on that or we can just phone and book a rate. The money is then sent to our account in the right currency. When you book a rate though it is a contract to buy.

If you want to get an approximation of the bank rate you can get this from the Royal Bank of Canada This is for the cheque rate and is an indication of what you might get. From Custom House we can usually get a bit better than the banks.

Hiya - this is exactly the answer I was looking for, cheers for that.
Chris.

When the bank manager spoke with us, he asked me to ring him before we transfered our cash with anyone

What they advertise, is not the rate you will get if you are doing a large sum

We will be getting rates from hifix, our canadian bank and ofcourse our uk bank, play them off against each other

Gill

Some people use HSBC, they can set you up an account in canada and then transfer the money over for you. I must admit i did not like their attitude in the UK. You can also use HIFX (www.HIFX.co.uk) or Ukforex (www.ukforex.co.uk) or moneycorp (www.moneycorp.co.uk) i used moneycorp i transfered our money from my UK account using Chaps to moneycorp and it was in my canadian account the next day.

UK forex have an online system where you can get quotes for the exchange online, the others didn't offer that facility. Remember most companies will quote you a spot rate, that won't be the rate you actually get (you will normally get less).

9 ou of 10 times the companies mentioned above will be better than bank exchange rates.

Hope this helps

Regards

Steve

if it helps we use lloydstsb in the uk
bank with rbc in canada

Wouldnt use hsbc, been into the uk branch and very unhelpful, but i suppose different branchs are different, our hsbc branch put me off them for life, plus they where 40mins late on there appointment, bad start :curse:
(that was a few years ago when we looked at swopping accounts)

Gill

Yep same experiance for me, we went into HSBC in Uk and said we wanted to open current acount they demanded that we close all our accounts with other banks before they would open a current account. Surprisingly enough we told them where they could deposit their current account


Steve

Hi there

We too use Custom House for all our FX needs. We purchased our property on Vancouver Island in April '05 and opened a TD canadian bank account at the same time.

When we transferred the largest of the amounts in £'s, we used HIFX, but unfortunately, they don't offer such good rates on small amounts of money unless you lock into a set amount per month.

Custom House are great, I have an on-line account which allows me to make transactions on-line, anytime of day or night and get a fantastic rate (whatever the amount and get maybe 3-4 cents difference between them and the current live rate!! hope that makes sense ).

Have a UK contact for them is you want it, just PM me.

We are nearing our move over to our new home and have monies waiting to transfer over, but like real saddoos we are constantly watch BBC ceefax page 241, this give the live market rates, hoping and praying for the rate to go back up. When we exchanged the deposit for our house in April '05 we got 2.36 to the £ , or what a difference now . At least it seems to have recovered slightly over the past week or so

Regards Sue