Hi Everyone,
Please can anyone give me any advice on transferring money to our account at RBC. We have asked our bank here about setting up an order to transfer a fixed amount each month, but they tell us they want £25 for the pleasure of doing it. Does anyone know of a way to do this that wont cost the earth?
Thanks, Susan.

Open two PayPal accounts, one UK and one Canadian. You can withdraw from your bank account for free with that, transfer over to the Canadian one, then have it deposited for free in your Canadian bank. I do the same with a US and Canadian account and it works fine. The exchange rate for the currency is comparable to any regular bank too.

There is probably a limit of $1000 at a time for the free accounts, but you can do it as often as you like.

If you can wait 3 weeks for the money, just write a cheque from your UK acc and deposit it into your RBC acc. We did this when we first got here and got a better exchange rate than any of the published rates at the time

You forgot to mention it takes 7 to 10 days, as all money moved through Paypal from one country to another is investigated by the US Treasury, for anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism reasons. Paypal is US based.

Only takes 4 days from US to Canada. Don't know about other countries though.

I used Currencies Direct (www.currenciesdirect.com), currency traders in London, I set up on the internet and clear security in 24 hours. Due to the immediate for dollars I used a spot trade and the dollars were in my canadian bank account within 3 working days. I had to pay £15 for a CHAPS transfer, but if I had more time I could have used BACS and done it for nothing.

There is no commision for transfers over £5000 and I got a rate, 3 cents under that advertised on www.xe.com, this was about 6 or 7 cents higher than the high streets offer...

Mark
Stuck in Halifax hotel, homeless with a screaming one year-old!