British Expats - Moving money back to the UK

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- - Moving money back to the UK (https://britishexpats.com/forum/moving-back-uk-61/moving-money-back-uk-927635/)

Moving money back to the UK

I have just returned to Australia after my trip to the UK and I am almost ready to start making the move back.

I managed to open a bank account in the UK (Barclays) and I am ready to start transferring money using a 3rd party FX vendor, so I can buy a car, pay deposit for rental, etc.

The only query I have is around anti money laundering regulations when depositing funds into a new account from overseas and keeping everything above board and legitimate.

I have read somewhere there is a limit on transaction sizes but I could not find anything in the banks T&Cs and the FX company did not seem too phased by it when I asked them about transaction limits.

Can anyone give me any clarities around this.

Re: Moving money back to the UK

We did similar in 2016/17. We used Transferwise for transferring sums of money, up to $15k at a time to our UK bank and Transferwise prompts for a reason and source for the transfers. I simply put "living in England now" as a reason and "Savings" or "US Pensions" as the source.

When it came to transferring hundreds of thousands of $'s for the England house purchase in 2017 I got a "dealing desk rate" from my bank in the US and gave the reason as "House purchase" and source of funds as "Sale of house".

After the house purchase in England had been accepted I was required to show statements of US savings accounts to prove that I had the funds to buy as it was a "cash" purchase. In the days before the transfer of money from my UK bank to our lawyer for the purchase I had to show a money trail, so I emailed screenshots showing the money leaving our US brokerage (where the money from the US house sale was sitting) to our UK bank.

Re: Moving money back to the UK

We’ve moved six figure sums to and from the US from and to the UK (for house purchases also) using OFX and they’ve been great. Our experience has been as follows (after opening an account with OFX of course) and our most recent experience was about a year ago:

- you set up the deal on the OFX website
- they then call you to confirm the deal - and they may ask what the money is for etc.
- you then have so many business days to fund the deal (send them the money). This for us was the most nerve wracking part the first time we sent them money. But the money magically appeared where we wanted it with no problem.

Just one tip - their system may have changed since we last did a large transfer - but we found it was most convenient to be in the country where the funds were - so we could go into our bank to wire funds to OFX’s intermediary bank (in the same country) and then the funds would appear in the overseas country nominated account a day or two later.

Apologies if if you knew already all the above. And your experience may be different.

Finally - and I could be wrong on this - OFX started out as Ozforex, so they should be good for Oz transfers.

Cheers. HTH

Re: Moving money back to the UK

Quote:

Originally Posted by fastrhino (Post 12730456)

All great advice received so far. I've used OFX for quite a few years now to transfer funds to and from Oz and the UK, have always been very impressed with them. I've transferred amounts up to AU$550,000 (proceeds of property sale) in a single OFX transaction. The only delay I had was the maximum daily amount I could send to OFX from my Commonwealth bank account was $100,000 but OFX were fine with me sending the money over 6 days.

As has been suggested, for large amounts ring the brokers desk and negotiate a better rate. When you fill in your online OFX forms you'll be asked for the source of your funds and the purpose, I just put Oz property sale for the source and property purchase in the UK for the purpose.

As also previously mentioned, if you're purchasing a house in the UK then when you complete the paperwork in your UK bank they'll also ask for the source of your funds.

Hope that helps a bit, good luck with it all.

Re: Moving money back to the UK

Hi, also have a look at dualitybanx.com, the fees are fixed so for transfers over €5k they could work out cheaper than banks or other transfer companies - Transfers over €15k you may need to prove source of funds.