sterling to euros

[maconnaisemaconnaise]

I have been reading previous posts on this subject so I thought some of you may be interested in this. Because of the awful exchange rates at the moment I had a rethink on how we move our pension moneys to France. We previously used HIFX and the minimum ammount they will handle is £5000. This means that we always had at least £5000 between an English bank account and La Banque Postale that was not earning interest.

HIFX state, “The prices shown are "interbank" exchange rates. Your rate will be determined by the amount of currency that you are buying.” Historically HIFX have given us between 0.0184 & 0.0223 below their interbank exchange rate for that day. When we bought our house in France a few years ago, Barclays bank actually gave a better rate than HIFX that day on a larger sum.

Now I have opened two accounts with Nationwide international. The sterling one gives an interest rate of 5.55% and the euro a/c an interest rate of 2.5%. On the 12 March I moved less than £5000 from the sterling a/c to the euro a/c at a rate of 1.3011.

To compare:

HIFX was giving a daily spot rate of 1.3081 (Difference of 0.007) and on 13 March HIFX gave a previous days high as 1.3111 and a low of 1.3014. I looked at the XE site a few times during the day too and it looked like a general trend downwards throughout the day.

I have yet to transfer money from the euro a/c to La Banque Postale (minimum 500euros) but I underestand that there is a 28 euros flat fee.

See http://www.nationwideinternational.com/ for all the rules and regulations. A lot of offshore sites that I looked at needed a lot of money to open an account.

I have been looking on:

http://www.laposte.com/-Already-living-in-France-

and I don’t think that La Banque Postale should charge for receiving money.

Picking up on another thread, all these accounts can be run on line so queueing is not necessary.