Braintreegirl

Hi everyone,

This is my first message since arriving in the States at the beginning of August and once again I need you lots advice!

We are in the process of selling our house in England as we would not be able to keep both houses going and when it completes I wondered what is the best method of transferring the proceeds of sale out here? We have bank accounts in England and out here now but wondered what was the best way of making the most of our money with the current exchange rates and not being stung for fees etc.,

Any help greatly appreciated.

Ray

www.xe.com

jumping doris

I have just used my account with XE for the first time and it was really easy. I set the account up awhile ago and that isn't hard to do either.

The people at XE are endlessly helpful even though I must have won their idiot of the month award.

BritGuyTN

of course they are nice - they're canadian...

sangiano

Likewise. Our first "test" transfer is in progress at present. They ask for lots of details to prove your identity (probably due to money laundering regs) when opening an account (which can all be submitted by secure mail), but after that, it's easy.

There's a nice Live Demonstration at http://www.xe.com/fx/ so you can see how it works on a test system.

Braintreegirl

Thanks for your help again. I'm not looking forward to the "proof of identity" bit again as I seem to have done this about 100 times already!

sangiano

I know exactly what you mean!!!

We have scanned all our identity documents and saved them in pdf and jpg formats, so it only takes a few minutes to find whatever they want now.

Braintreegirl

This is a really great idea but I don't have a scanner so can't really go down this road.

jumping doris

Could you scan them at the library and then email them to yourself and then store the emailed file?

Longy

Or alternatively just use a digital camera and take a picture of it? That is what I did and they had no problem with it - not as good quality as scanning, but good enough.

Actually on the subject of XE, I have used them quite a few times, but will need to transfer a large sum soon, how did people manage to transfer the money to XE in the first place? Barclays have a £1,000 limit on online transfers at the moment and I think its only £5,000 if you call them up - so what do you have to do to transfer a lot more? Does it just take them longer to transfer or do you need to give them something in writing?

jumping doris

You just gave me a heart attack. I hadn't thought to check with my UK bank if there was a limit to an online transfer
However I have just checked and they have sent the money....phew!
We are with Royal Bank of Scotland.

When we first moved here we wanted to move fairly large sums after we sold our UK house. We set up an ongoing transfer thing before we left the UK and went into the bank, provided ID (passports) signed the forms and thought we were all set.
It worked the first time...we just faxed a letter to the bank asking them to transfer x amount to our US bank and they used the blanket authority we had signed in the UK.
Then some idiot at the bank threw it away and so when we went to move more money we had to FedEx another signed form (which they had fedexed to us ...all at our expense!!!)
Then they phone with a rate which you accept or decline and if you accept the rate they transfer the money.
Easy if all the documents are in place but a hassle when they are not.I just found that every time I phoned our UK bank the person I had dealt with had left and the new person seemed unable to understand what I wanted.

Longy

Yeah I suspect I will have to give them something in writing before transferring the full sum - even though doing this via XE, for Barclays it is actually only a UK to UK transfer and I have made several transfers to them before.

Braintreegirl

I think the way round this might be to set up a direct debit with XE from the UK bank. We are with Nat West and they said they will not send more than £10,000 in one transaction and then of course they charge for the wire in the first place. Another way would be to set up a mandate for a third party signature on your account with someone you trust in the UK?

kins

We recently used InterchangeFX to transfer the proceeds from our house sale from the UK to the US.

I set up the account before we left the UK, which made life much easier. I have since set up a couple of accounts with other companies like WorldFirst, but it was much harder to prove my identity and address because we had no utility bills and virtually nothing else official with our current address on it.

As for transferring large sums between UK banks, we bank with First Direct so we just phoned them up and asked them to do a CHAPS transfer and gave them the account details for the InterchangeFX account. They called us back to verify who we were. It was a 6-figure sum but that was all they required. The fee was £20. We could've done a BACS transfer for no fee but we wanted to move the money straight away.

InterchangeFX gave us $2.037 to the £1 which was more than anyone else (who I had an account with at least) was offering. It's worth opening a few accounts and shopping around.

Elvira

No need to use wire transfer (which entails fees). What you do is use BACs at the UK end and electronic transfer at the US end.

Call the nice chaps/gals at XE Trade - they'll explain it all. It really is very simple.

There is no transfer limit other than your individual limit set by XE Trade, which I believe they determine based on some credit check. Again, ask them to explain - they're ever so helpful!