Heart of the Home Dining

Whether you’re a free spirited global citizen who lives out of a case, a travelling entrepreneur or a migrant worker, it is essential to find the cheapest and most efficient way to transfer your money overseas or send money home, as transfer fees can be exorbitant. You are also going to want to watch the currencies to see when the currency in the country you are transferring to is weakest, so that you can get the most out of the exchange. For the time I spent travelling, getting used to new currencies and moving money was one of the hardest things to come to grips with, so make sure you are properly prepared and informed on this front.

If you get an urgent message from a family member that says, ‘send money quickly, all my money was stolen’, you won’t want them to wait for four weeks for a cheque to clear because they’d probably starve by then. So, as well as the cheapest method, you will want to use the quickest method. Foreign Exchange dealers specialise in this field and are invariably a lot cheaper than banks when it comes to transferring money between countries. You can find many online reputable dealers, which is helpful because you can simply manage all your transfers online.

Having said that, when you move over to another country, one of the things you need to do immediately is open a bank account in that country. Make sure you bring all the correct paperwork with you (usually they require three month’s bank statements from your bank back home). Some banks have branches in other countries, so if you stick to the same bank in both countries, you’ll be paying less to transfer savings between the two accounts. Even in this case, dealers are usually the cheaper option, so it’s important to do your homework; otherwise you may end up losing as much as 25% of your initial amount.

The problem most people have with online dealers is that, unlike high street banks, they are an unknown entity. It need not be like that – you can get all the information you need on the internet to determine if an online Foreign Exchange dealer is trustworthy. Read reviews from other people who have gone through the experience of transferring money across borders, and come to your own conclusions. I have to admit that I wish I had known about this service before I went travelling, I would have saved a lot in banking fees.