Thanks Roger! Huge, huge help. Youāve saved me hours of work on this. Did it take long for them to open up the USD sub-account?
Good to know on the Portuguese as well. Have you tried the Google Translate Chrome Extension? You should be able to just click that button and translate instead of copying/pasting the URL. It should almost certainly work on a secure page. I tested it on my US bank just to confirm and it worked (my BiG account is in the final stage of setup or else I would have tried there). Hopefully that helps!
Once the euros were registered in the BiG euro account, it took about 24 hours or so - most of the delay being the 6 hour time lag between Austin and Portugal.
Confirming the results of my 350k transfer:
For a $45 wire fee from my USAA Bank acct via Mellon Bank Intermediary, I transferred $410k to my to BiG bank (USD account) where $409,977,28 (not sure where I lost $22.72 - but not sweating it.)
This morning, I had BiG convert $409,977,28 from my USD account to 363, 374.50 Euros (conversion rate of 1.12825 which includes a 0.125 spread).
Had I used Wise to transfer dollars from USAA to my BiG Euro account this morning, I would have received 362,377.68 euros. NOTE for BiG account holders, BiG does NOT allow WISE transfers, but I am citing this as a comparison for others who may be planning a transfer of large sums from their US account to their PT bank. I suggest you have your PT bank open a USD sub-account, so you can wire USD to USD, then convert to euros at your PT bank. Check with your PT bank what their fees/spread is for conversion so you can check which method may be the most cost efficient.
Good Luck
Roger
Have any US applicants encountered issues with wiring USD to an foreign exchange converter such as Rational FX? I use Bank of America and they are holding back the funds because they are afraid that I am scammed.
By way of comparison, I just transferred via two USD wire transfers from Fidelity to my Atlantico USD account a total of $425,000 with Atlantico taking $23.95 per transfer in fees. This left $424,952.04 which I converted to euros at 1.141 resulting in 372.438,25 in my euro account. I am jealous of your spread, but very happy with the responsiveness, customer support, and convenience of the bank so far.
BiG is āBanco Investimento Globaleā aka BiG Bank. It is a Portuguese owned bank.
Note the website currently has NO English options and BiGs app is also in Portuguese. If you use the Chrome browser to access the BiG site, Chrome can translate the page to English.
I found their fees to be competitive and a bit cheaper in some areas. Phone/ email response has been excellent.
Is there a bank that uses mid market rate? So I send USD from US bank account and get the best rate by Portuguese bank so they take very less margin because US banks would give worst exchange rate. Wise(formerly Transferwise) fees are also significant.
You have to remember that ANY bid/ask you see ANYWHERE is an APPROXIMATION or the bid/ask for whatever set of dealers that the price source you are looking at is seeing. The entire FX market is over-the-counter, all of the various desks trading with each other in whatever way they do, and trading with whoever they happen to be hooked up with. There are a few aggregators like FXall or OANDA that are mini centralized markets but thereās no āworld marketā with āone consistent bid/askā; itās all kept together by market makers arbing between the various liquidity sources. So what is āmid-marketā? an abstraction at best.
Besides, mid-market as of when? the prices move mid-day quite a bit, so itās really just dependent on the internal processes of the bank - if they do all transactions for the day at once, or if they deal with your transaction individually and when they do it, what spread they expect to charge.
You can improve this somewhat. But I would just assume that whatever you do, youāre going to wobble by a few hundred bucks from the ābest possible you might have ever managedā because your ability to get to some optimal solution is limited. There are a bunch of options listed up-thread and I think in a couple other threads. Thatās about as good an answer as you will ever get.
As you can see from the data above, Bison is pretty close to mid market - they do have a markup, but it is quite modest - they USED TO have no markup, but have recently added one.
I will also say, for the purposes of this GV transfer which is large one-time one, the timing of the transfer (given the volatility of the exchange rate itself) is likely to make a MUCH larger difference than the relative rates across different channels at any given time.
Hi @garrett - thought to gently ask if any updates on IBKR and this nutty response?
IBKR actively markets their FX trading, so not sure what this is about?
Or any alternatives that you have found sufficient?
I note that FX is one of the highest cost financial transactions that occurs and itās also the reason why banks love it (not to mention all the front-running and fixing they can doā¦).
There are usually two fees:
FX processing fee
The FX conversion price vs the actual spot / mid-market FX rate
ā¦ and most of those services claiming to be low-cost usually make #1 a small amount but get you in #2.
Thanks!
Got the following from Interactive Brokers yesterday, I emailed their support team with my plan (basically, put money in as USD, convert to EUR, withdraw via sepa to invest) and am waiting to hear back.
They mean that they donāt want to be a mechanism for moving money around between bank accounts and countries.
You can trade FX all you want, as positions with leverage on the platform, same as you can on FXAll or OANDA. They donāt want you continually doing actual FX exchange for the purpose of moving money from one bank account to the other in order to save on currency spreads.
These are two very different matters. The latter opens them up to AML oversight concerns and as a brokerage house focused on trading activity they donāt want any part of it.
This is the same as their conjunction that you canāt withdraw money for 40 days and then it has to go back to the bank account it came from and all that.
I realize from the outside it looks stupid. however, I work for a broker/dealer, Iāve read the AML and BSA stuff, and I completely get it - stupid or not, they didnāt make the rules.
So while you can try doing it, and might be able to do it, I would not count on it as a mechanism to use in general.
We are just beginning the GV process for a 280k rehabilitation project. Does anyone know if we are able to move the 280k from multiple US accounts?
The reason Iām asking is that I will have to move the money in 30-60 days and Iām considering purchasing a forward contract for part of the money. So, concretely, letās say I purchase a forward contract with OFX to purchase ā¬140k on September 15th. That ā¬140k would be with OFX and the money would come from a US dollar account (Schwab). To avoid going through multiple transactions I would then likely transfer that ā¬140k directly from OFX to my Portugal bank. The remaining ā¬140k might come directly from Schwab. I am still working through all the possibilities but would obviously like to minimize the losses while also potentially hedging through a forward contract. So, I am asking whether these transfers would all ācountā as originating from the US/my Schwab account. Secondarily, if anyone has advice on how to do the ā¬280k transfer Iād appreciate that as well. This thread has some good ideas but Iām still not sure what the best way is.
Gregory: we did the transfer of the ābig moneyā the old-fashioned way - from our US bank to the PT bank. My bank charges were $45 and the intermediary banks charged an addition $42. Took about 3 days. I just did a smaller transfer with Wise, which charges a percentage of the amount transferred plus $4. In that case, it cost me $18 and was available the next day. As has been mentioned on other threads, do NOT use Wise for large transfers. Had I done that with the ābig moneyā the cost would have been about $1700.
As to your question about origination, I donāt know, but wonder why it matters where it originates? So long as you are investing in a qualified project, I would think it would count even if you used funds from a PT bank that had been established and sitting in PT for years. Curious if others have some insight.
Hi Ed, thanks for the insights into Wise. Thatās good to know.
For the origination question, I think they want to be sure the money came from outside the country. Iām not sure how recent it would have to be, though.
