Since I will soon have to transfer my money from an USD ($) bank account (Wells-Fargo) to France (in EUR €), I had to look around to find the best solution. With the help of one friend, I started discovering some solutions last year ; but none of them were satisfying. I thus looked a little bit more on forums and found two interesting threads. One is unfortunately in French (google translate it if you want) , but hopefully the most interesting one is in English.
- http://philadelphieaccueil.superforum.fr/t1271-transfert-d-argent-des-usa-vers-la-france-a-moindre-frais – read the 4th message (English Translation)
- http://www.pomsinadelaide.com/forum/money-finance/19410-did-you-use-www-currencyonline-com.html – more interesting
My quest for bank/currency transfers came through ‘bank-to-bank’ transfers, ‘Western Union’, Paypal and XOOM. But the final solution I found was to use a dedicated online transfer company. There exist several of them (part of them listed in the second link above). I also followed the advice of Mark Xpnist and asked for a quotation to the following three companies :
I will try to find time to update this blogpost as soon as I have some replies.
A good ressource for currency conversion : http://www.xe.com
______ EDIT – March 14th _______
I decided to test ‘Currency Online’ (I picked up this one at random). In order to test the service, I first prepared a payment of $100 USD to EUR . Two fees were applied on my payment. The first one comes from Currency Online, the second comes from my bank.
- Currency Online will charge a fee on bank transfer that are less than $5000 USD worth. Above that amount, there will be no fee.
- Wells Fargo will charge $3 USD for a transfer below $2000 to a non wells fargo account. Above that amount, the fee increases to $10.
So, for my $100 USD transfer, I finally had to pay $107.
Next time, I plan to transfer >$5000 … so I will pay $10.