On Nov 26 2004, 17:53, meltie lists wrote:
>
> I just went to my bank (HSBC) in the UK to pay about 39 euros to an
IBAN
> in Germany. Bank fees were 9 pounds sterling! OUCH!!
Ouch! That's a *lot*. Last time I paid using IBAN it cost a fraction
of that (but it was using the University's account; maybe they have
different terms). My experience in sending money to the States, for
what it's worth, is that bank transfers are most expensive, Western
Union wire transfers are slightly better, BidPay is much cheaper (well,
less expensive), credit cards (if the seller accepts them directly) are
pretty good, PayPal is cheapest, and sending cash is pretty cheap but
I'm wary of sending cash by mail, especially airmail.
I have accounts with more than one bank, for historical reasons, and
one of them offered to create me a Euro account when I complained that
their "inexpensive" charges for sending money to Europe were umpteen
times what a Eurocheque would have cost. It turned out that made
individual transfers cheap but the account maintenance charges more
than made up for that unless I had quite a high balance.
It seems that the UK is just not the place to be if you want to buy
stuff from abroad :-(
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Received on Fri Nov 26 2004 - 13:46:07 GMT