I recently had to change a reasonably large amount of currency from the UL into US dollars. Due to the economy and possibly the up coming UK general election the rates are not great.
In found the rate from my US bank, Bank of America, and this made the situation even worse.

But what can you do?

The explanation below is using some rounded numbers to make the post easier to read and understand and the companies mentioned are the companies I used, this doesn't mean there are not other out there.

For this example, I am using 100,000 GBP and a Exchange rate of 1.50000.

Exchange rate - 1.50000
(I use FXStreet.com to get live Forex rates - http://www.fxstreet.com/rates-charts...rts/?id=gbpusd)

Bank of America - 1.4430

I would receive - $144,300

Amount lost from Forex Rate - $5700

Now there are two different ways of doing this depending on whether you still have a UK account. I don't

Open a Foreign Currency Account (World Currency Access Deposit Account) with EverBank.com

Deposit GBP into account

EverBank offer an Exchange rate of (0.9925 x the Exchange Spot Rate)

Exchange Rate (1.500) x (0.9925) = 1.48875

This would give me $148,875, an extra $4,575 over the Bank of America rate.

Now that's not the end of it!

If you open an account with Ashley Ingle at Excel Currencies Ltd ( http://www.excelcurrencies.com/) you can either move money to your account with them directly from a UK bank or "wire" it from your EverBank account in GBP. There is a $50 charge from EverBank for this "wire".

Excel Currencies usually exchange at 35 - 50 "pips" off the Exchange Spot rate, therefore at 1.50000 you would get 1.4965 - 1.4950. So at the worse rate this would equate to $149,500.

This saves another $625 over the EverBank rate and a massive $5,200 over the Bank of America rate.

It took me about 8 hours to sort this information out, that's about $650 per hour, well worth the trouble. The actually trading of the money is an easy process.

As the information above can save you a large amount of money and I can not charge you for this information. I would request that you make a donation to a local charity of your choice, if you use the information above.


Disclaimer: I have tried to give you as much information as possible but you need to do your "due diligence" checks on the exact charges and rates you will encounter. This is my opinion and not legal or financial advice. The currency market can be very volatile and therefore can produce large gains and loses.

Bank rates are rubbish. We used UKForex about two weeks ago and got nearly the midmarket rate. No charge on that end and only $12 to receive it in our US bank.

You should check out xe.com It costs nothing to transfer money. There are enough threads on this subject on these forums I suggest you check them out and the XE site. It takes a bit of your time to set it up but you will not know unless you try. Can be transferred in 24/72hrs.

If you want a bank with a huge branch network you are going to pay one way or the other.

xe.com hifx.com ukforex.com are the usual suspects....bank is a last resort as they're all shite for large sums of money.

If you have HSBC Premier accounts (UK and US) you can do same day free transfers. I just checked, and the rate is 1.5216, which compares pretty favourably to forex's streaming rate of 1.5248, considering the convenience.

The XE rate ws 1.5065 which on a 100K transfer is a difference of $2K less than HSBC.

I know not that many will have HSBC, but don't assume banks give poor rates all the time.

No - they just give shite rates 99.9% of the time. HSBC Premier is a premium service for higher net worth customers - not just joe public who will get royally shafted by their local HSBC branch every time.

Alternatively just do a search on BE and find the 50,000 other threads that tell you to do the exact same thing!

Thanks for sharing - but it's already well documented.

I'll take the 0.1% thanks And I'm not a high net worth, they waived the minimum balance requirement for some reason. I wasn't going to argue!

8 hours to work out that the banks do not give a good exchange rate - it took me about 10 seconds.

Well now I am f**ked

I just found a ten pound note and figured I'd get at least $16.00 for it