Sending money to friends, relatives or business associates in the United States is a reasonably common thing to do these days. As technology knocks down the barriers of geography, our personal and business lives are becoming more and more global in nature. The problem is that transferring currency abroad can often be an expensive and confusing proposition, with plenty of players in the market and all of them telling you how great, cost effective and secure their services are. This means that what may appear to be the cheapest way to send money to the USA, may not actually be all it appears.
Let’s cut the wheat from the chaff and take a real look at what the cheapest options are for sending money to relatives or business partners stateside. You’ve got a few options, some of them coming from more traditional businesses such as banks and remittance services and some of them from online service providers like us.
Using banks or ‘bricks and mortar’ remittance houses
Here’s a quick list of things that you need to be mindful of if you’re going to make the decision to go down to a high street bank branch or remittance counter and ask them to transfer some currency over to the States for you:
-Banks will often charge very high fees for international transfers and the receiving bank will also charge the recipient a fee in many cases.
-An international telegraphic transfer can take up to a week to arrive, sometimes longer.
-A remittance service transacting less than 3,000,000 Euro a month has no legal obligation to protect the funds of the client while they are holding them.
-When banks advertise low or zero fees, this is often offset by unreasonably marked-up exchange rates.
-You’re probably going to find yourself spending a lot of time in a queue and filling out paperwork.
Using online services to remit funds overseas
If you’ve decided that banks are not the right choice and you think it might be better to take a look at your options for online service providers, you’ve still got to exercise a fair bit of caution. Here are some things to watch out for:
-Most operators have either a sliding scale fee structure or charge a percentage. Some also charge a flat rate on top of this. For example, transferring 200 Pounds to the US with some online financial services would cost you £9.80 in commission, plus an extra 20 pence for the privilege.
-Many operators do not get the money where it’s going quickly. Some operators will have it in an account administered by their service within a few seconds, but it may take as long as five days to get it though.
-On top of the fees that they are charging, many online remittance services will also load their exchange rates unreasonably.
So as you can see, even when dealing with online operations, you’ve still got to shop around. Here at OrbitRemit we really don’t see why sending money to the United States should leave you out of pocket – many of our customers are transferring much needed funds to family. We offer not only the cheapest, but also one of the fastest ways to get funds straight into an American bank account.
We charge a flat £5 transfer fee, no matter what the amount you’re sending is – however right now for a limited time all fees are completely free of charge! Additionally we give you your first transfer fee-free (without exchange rate tomfoolery you often see from banks) and if you’re sending money regularly we’ll also give you every tenth transfer free. Our exchange rates are extremely favourable by comparison to other operators and we’ll have the funds in the recipient’s bank account the same day the funds are released to us.
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