pixelnurse

Hi All,

I was preparing to transfer my inheritance from the solicitors account in the UK to Moneycorp and then on to my bank account in California. As many of you know Moneycorp can no longer do this due to new US regulations.

I looked at both HiFX and UKForex but neither can service California. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Many thanks,
Lee

md95065

Why can't your just instruct your solicitor to make a direct wire transfer from their account to your US account?

markwm

I've always used xe.com: don't know about any new regulations (what are they?) but worth a look. If you had an HSBC account I think they're pretty good at transferring money form a UK account to a US one.

pixelnurse

Because it'll be thousands of dollars more in fees or crappy exchange rates than if I use a Forex company.

Thanks markwm, I'll try them.

md95065

Are you really sure about that?

The rates that I get doing direct bank to bank international wire transfers seem quite reasonable to me.

I did look at using a broker a couple of years ago but (as you appear to be discovering) the sheer hassle and inconvenience of getting everything set up just looked like more trouble that it was worth in terms of time and effort (compared with spending about 30 seconds on my bank's web site and having the transfer go out within 10 minutes).

GeoffM

Comparing Lloyds to XE, the XE rate was a full 5% better than Lloyds. Over a grand of difference when I transferred a largish sum over recently - not to be sniffed at! Then both Lloyds and Wells Fargo charged wire transfer fees, whereas via XE there were none - all I did was an online transfer (free) to XE, and XE did... um... ACH I think into my WF account (free). Timewise exactly the same, though Lloyds sit on your money for a couple of days before doing anything with it - my mum did an A&L transfer and it appeared in WF within hours.

That's only comparing Lloyds->WF and Lloyds->XE->WF so YMMV.

Edit: Comparing the two today, transferring GBP10,000 would yield $170 extra with XE, though with my combination of banks it would be more like $200 due to fees. Not as much as I quoted above but of course we're looking at fluctuating exchange rates here.

lansbury

The difference between using NatWest and World First, is NatWest are between and 5 and 10 cents to the £ less in the exchange rate, and last time I used NatWest they charged me £38 for the privilege, while World First don't charge a fee. That adds up when transferring my pension over every few months.

Mr Weeze

I've just heard from a friend it's down to licensing and Moneycorp aren't licensed in 4 states, with Texas being one of them. XE are good for Texas apparently. I don't know about California or whether/when Moneycorp will sort out licensing (don't they sponsor a forex sub-forum on here?), but I would guess California is the same situation.

gad33

We used Moneycorp to transfer funds from Canada to the US. So got a bit of a shock last month when we tried to transfer the balance and couldn't because we were in California, so we used Venstar.

lndn2nbca

I recently used xe.com because Moneycorp can't do California anymore. Seemed to be hassle free as these things can be.