£500k / £30k = 16.66666 so 16 smaller payments. Is that such a burden?
Personally, I'd much rather do lots of small transfers than one big one. Not that I'll ever have to transfer £500k-£1m to Spain.
In preparation for retirement I've been trying to investigate the best way to transfer significant sums from UK to the Euro zone (Spain).
For smaller transfers we have used Wise (formerly Transferwise). In fact when buying our flat in Spain we sent multiple ~£30k transfers (for safety) using this method.
My problem is that when I do retire, we are relocating permanently and likely to need to transfer £500k-£1m depending on what assets we retain in the UK.
Transferwise although regulated is not even part of the FSCS (so not even the £75k protection that offers). Whats the cheapest "Safe" way fo doing this kind of transfer? I'm loathe to hand over close to 5 figures (when costing in the poorer exchange rate) to a bank for them to do it!
Has anyone done the research on this?
£500k / £30k = 16.66666 so 16 smaller payments. Is that such a burden?
Personally, I'd much rather do lots of small transfers than one big one. Not that I'll ever have to transfer £500k-£1m to Spain.
Couple of reasons:
Safety as above, these transfers carry some risk
Not sure if doing multiple transfers like that would trigger some kind of algo for money laundering investigations?
The larger the transfer, better the exchange rate (generally)
I do however note that the max transfer for Wise (Transferwise) is £1m so assume some people do use it for large transfers....
Last edited by Scepticalist; 12th August 2022 at 10:53.
I use Torfx for large currency swaps.
I wouldn't imagine it's any more secure than the service you're already using though.
I would think your biggest headache is going to be getting flagged for money laundering.
I have recent experience of this, and lost access to a large amount of money for several weeks.
HSBC used to offer a Euro account for ex pats I’m sure others will as well.
I use Wise for all my business transactions outside of the UK. Never had a problem. Would suggest multiple smaller payments is definitely worth considering.
Why not leave it in the UK and draw down on it as needed ?.
It would be a shame to move such a large sum when the current x rate isn't brilliant. But if you can find a spanish a/c that gives you a decent rate of interest then scratch the above. I'd also investigate Spanish law regarding your estate before deciding which country to hold the bulk of your cash in
I'm an expat, and many people relocate to the EU "Permanently". Then decide for many reasons to move back to the UK - I'm one of those very people.
My reasons for moving back are many, but amongst them is the fact that we do not have children - therefore 60% of our worldwide estate will go to the French government.
There are a lot of expats selling up and moving back in my local area, brexit has really screwed expat life.
Last edited by catflem; 12th August 2022 at 16:11.
If I may: same situation last year (bought a property in Portugal, large one-off transfer >EUR 100k). (Transfer)Wise worked fine, though we didn't keep any money with them, i.e. set up the account (passed KYC checks, address verified etc) then initiated the transfer/locked in the exchange rate, transferred the GBP amount to Wise from our own UK bank (CHAPS transfer, cost 20£ from my bank), received EUR from Wise into our EU (Spanish) current account.
They are not FSCS protected but you're assets should be ring-fenced anyway.
I would advise against transferring multiple smaller amounts, that can trigger fraud alerts and issue with any bank's anti-money laundering / compliance department.
Feel free to PM me if you like. Best wishes, Dan
Wise is very good but unsure for such large sums?
For what it's worth, from Wise's website: "Is it safe to send large amounts with Wise?" https://wise.com/help/articles/29779...unts-with-wise
But granted, there probably are risks - always are. When we did it, we were a bit nervous, but the exchange rate Wise offered was just so much better than our UK bank's rate (was more than 2% - a grand per 50k GBP transferred)
I used World First to do something similar a couple of years ago.
I was assigned a relationship manager so she knew exactly what my intentions were ie transfer a sum of money to another country which meant no AML issues.
We agreed different FX rates at which to sell GBP (ie in a laddered fashion). A couple of times the agreed rate was hit but happened so briefly I didn’t expect it to convert but it did so very tight spreads to market.
Once FX’d the amount was swept into the overseas bank account.
It all worked perfectly.
Good luck…