Hi all! I am new here, and I wonder if the wonderful community here has any amazing takes on ways to transfer fund to Portugal bank account?
Wise and bank rates seem quite expensive these days. Or Does Bison Bank take USD transfer and offer foreign exchange?
A couple threads out there, if you’re in the US, this thread is the most relevant
I did IBKR, and they weren’t exactly thrilled to have me only use them for forex, but they didn’t close my account or anything (and then I ended up using them for other stuff, so go figure)
In my opinion IBKR has a rabid compliance department. They offer forex but I believe they intend it for internal arbitrage and hedging, so if you use it to transfer foreign currency to other accounts you may own they get quite uptight about it. I think they don’t want to deal with the compliance burden imposed by the US government so they will potentially threaten to close your account.
thank you!
Is there any way to use USDC or USDT and convert it to Euros there?
You can buy EURC or EURT stablecoins.
However, as far as I can tell even the Portuguese version of Coinbase, for example, requires you to trade in USD. Maybe there is a European equivalent of Coinbase to convert the EURC stablecoin to euros. I don’t know of it.
I used my cash management account at Fidelity to transfer funds for the investment and found they were very helpful. I have heard Schwab was also helpful. etrade, which I attempted to use, was not so helpful however.
Thanks for sharing. How did it work? Transferred usd to directly from cash management account to PT bank? Or converted and then transferred?
I still used Wise. If you use their Wise Balance feature (like a bank account with them) it will save you on fees.
It’s not a loaded question, but are you totally ok transferring more than a couple of $k on Wise? Every time I tried it went into some compliance check status so I quickly abandoned the attempts. Even with official banks with physical offices and named human CEOs it is often difficult to trace and recover your own money. What with fintechs with AI a the helm?
Fidelity wired the money from a cash management account. In looking at my transaction, it looks like I wired USD.
I transfer my funds from Santander Bank in the US in dollars to my Bison Account in Portugal in Euros. Bison Bank exchanges the dollars to euros at a reasonable rate upon receipt of the dollars and Santander charges me 40 dollars per wire transfer. Santander offers to exchange dollars to euros for free (?) before transfer but I find their exchange rate is significantly higher (several points higher than Bison) in the end costing much more.
I’ve just started transferring USD to Bison, rather than converting to EUR in the US before sending. Agree, Bison has reasonable conversion rates.
Fidelity:
I watch the currency prices, convert each time it gets closer to parity.
Yes, I have tried it and was successful. First, I did test transactions of USD 100 and EUR 100 to and from my bank account in the US and Europe before doing large amount transfers. This is just to ensure that funds do arrive as intended without additional fees and deductions. There is a fee receiving USD into Wise balance account (small flat fee of USD 6).
Then, the USD can then be converted to EUR using Wise balance account. Wise uses mid-market rate so it’s very good (very close to the exchange rate that appears on the Fed’s site and on Google). They only charge a conversion fee of about 0.20% to 0.30% fee which is very reasonable (I would have lost about USD 2000-USD 3000 in the conversion process had I used my bank’s rate).
Once the money is in EUR, I can then utilize SEPA transfer (withdrawal from Wise balance) to my bank account in Portugal (or in any other banks in Europe that’s part of SEPA). Since I am using SEPA, the withdrawal fee is EUR 0.
I forgot to mention that Wise has not asked me for additional documents for my large transactions. I think the key trick is to ensure that the account name of the source account matches exactly the Wise account name and in case of transfers out or withdrawal, the recipient bank account name should also match exactly your Wise’s account name. Since I used one type of ID (my passport) for all 3 accounts, there wasn’t any issue for me (crossing fingers it continues this way).
I’ve done it a few ways. Keep in mind, moving money and converting money are two different things. Unlike the US, in Portugal, you can have accounts with multiple currencies.
–I transferred dollars from Schwab to Bison bank, and then converted to Euros. Its been some time, but I recall the fees were not to bad.
–Interactive brokers is great for converting currencies. You can send one transfer a month for free to your bank. My bank in Portugal does not charge a fee to receive. I’ve also sent Euros to wise. And then used wise to send the Euros to a 3rd party in Portugal. The fees were either zero, or so close to zero I didn’t care.
And for those that don’t know, many banks in Portugal have around a 10K euro limit on daily transfers. So, if you are making a down payment on real estate, it may take a few transfers.
From my limited experience, I inquired of one full service investment house that I use (I didn’t bother with my Fidelity relationship, I wanted more service). I’m getting very strong conversion rates, better than I expected, and no fees for the foreign wires based upon the relationship overall. So, ask your investment advisors before concluding you need to look elsewhere.
I used Schwab. They didn’t charge any fees. On the day I initiated the transfer the exchange rate for Euro-USD, as quoted on Yahoo Finance, was 1.0306 and the transfer went through at 1.03248.