International finance

[stephbg]

I can't believe how much it's going to cost to make a direct bank transfer to an English bank account. I want to be the computer bits that get paid to do the vastly complicated exchange calculations

Comments

[kaelajael]

Can you use Paypal?

[stephbg]

There's an idea, ta. I'll see what it takes to set up an account to receive money.

[gemfyre]

It took me forever to get a Paypal account because I'd heard so many horror stories and avoided it.

But I've never had any trouble. It just makes me online purchasing scarily easy because I don't even need my wallet anymore.

[kremmen]

Is the $40 total, or just the sending fee? If all you've asked is how much your bank will charge you to send money, that's not the end of the story. It's highly likely the receiving bank will charge a fee too. (And it may depend on whether the funds are sent in AUD or GBP.) I don't know if there may be intermediate banks that may charge fees as well for the UK, but that can happen if sending to the USA, depending upon the connectivity of the receiving bank.

The best solution depends on how much you are sending. PayPal has large % fees on currency transactions. It's great for small amounts but, for larger amounts, their fee will overtake the banks' up-front fee.

(One-off transactions are a real pain. The cheap way to go is to set up an account with XE or Oanda or similar, but there's significant effort doing so. If you ever need to send money to the USA, I could do it for you via my XE account.)

[emma_in_oz]

postal order much cheaper though then you have to pay for registered post