cheap way to transfer money to US trading account

beachyboy

Hi does anyone know what the cheapest way to transfer money (~20k) to a US trading account is? and how much I should expect to pay?

strmin

Does your broker have bank account in Europe? It would cost you nothing to deposit Euro.

beachyboy

good question - thanks - I'll find out ;-)

Cute Hoor

beachyboy wrote: »

Hi does anyone know what the cheapest way to transfer money (~20k) to a US trading account is? and how much I should expect to pay?

This is a tricky one. Most US brokers (check with yours) will require that funding comes from your own bank as opposed to a third party like CurrencyFair. IMO you will get the best exchange rate from CurrencyFair, there could be a difference of several hundred Euro between the rate you will get from CurrencyFair and the rate you will get from your own bank (on €20k) - don't take my word for this though, check out both and see what the difference is.

I know this is a bit of a roundabout way but this is something you can do to try to minimise these charges. You should be able to open a USD account with your Irish bank, you can then transfer your €20k from your normal bank account to a dollar amount with CurrencyFair and from there to your USD account with your own bank, and from there to your US broker. There are some charges but (incredibly one might think) this results in a reasonably significant saving compared with just transferring directly from your € bank account.

Somebody else might come up with a better (and cheaper) alternative

FudgeBrownie

I am with Ulster Bank and have a TD Ameritrade account. It costs me 50 cent and takes about 3 days to transfer cash over to the account.

ballyharpat

You could open a dollar deposit account with your bank, and also open a currency fair account, transfer your euros to Currency fair, then the $ from currency fair to your dollar account, then from there to your brokerage account. I use Firstrade and have done for the last 7 years, very happy with them and their rates, also, have been on the phone to them many times and I really like their customer service reps.