Sending Money Abroad: What is the best way?
It can be very confusing when you come to Australia and you do a search for Money Transfer on Google. Immediately you are given a choice of dozens of ways to send money abroad. We wanted to write this article to help explain each way so that you can make the best choice and save yourself as much as possible.
There is a number of reasons why you might have to send money home or send money over to Australia. For example when you come to Australia you might want to send money from your Irish account to your new Australian account. You might have a mortgage back in Ireland or who knows there is multiple reasons but more than likely you will have to do some sort of transfer while you are in Australia.
Option 1(Most common): Banks or online banking transfer
While this might seem like the most logical approach and easiest we tend to choose this option first, however what a lot of people don’t understand is just how much money banks make from international and national bank transfers. Expect to pay transfer charges, receiving charges, low exchange rates and “interest”.
Option 2: FX Brokers
These tend to deal directly in currency exchange and tend to offer much better rates than banks. But they can be quite hard to get your head around especially if you are not to familiar with currency exchange and exactly how it works.
Option 3: Off Shore Banking
By far the most famous of methods, mainly for its role in far to many movies.You can have multiple accounts with different currencies and simply transfer your money between these at next to no charges. However the charges for these accounts often out way the benefit and it is not the easiest to get into.
Option 4: Peer To Peer Marketplace
*Our pick. You have probably seen us mention CurrencyFair before, if you haven’t be sure to read our previous article. Essentially the way it works is CurrencyFair matches people sending money one way with people sending money the other way. Therefore avoiding the unnecessary bank and transfer charges. This will also mean that it will be a lot faster.
You can try out CurrencyFair now or watch this short video below which explains all the points we have just outlined in this article. 🙂