Expat Community > France

bhharrison
Joined 2016
Posts: 25

Getting the Best Exchange Rates

5 years ago

Hello all!! Here to ask the collective's opinion again, but this time on getting the best exchange rates. We've moving from the US to Montpellier and have considered using a service to purchase Euros so that we can get a good exchange rate. In researching this, however, it looks to me that this is more useful for those expats that have a bit more of a nest egg than my husband and I.

To give a bit of context, we are in our 40's and own a small business that we'll be continuing to run from home after the move. We typically transfer enough each week from the business to our personal account to cover our bills and give us a bit of spending money for the week, but we're certainly not extravagant.

One of the services we investigated doesn't charge a fee per se, but provides us an "adjusted" exchange rate, so I know they're getting their money. Our bank charges us a flat $40 fee, but the exchange rate they gave us on our initial transfer was less than the exchange rate I pulled for the Central European Bank for that day (yes, I know it fluctuates during the day). And then lastly is Western Union. From what we can tell, they wouldn't charge a fee for the size wire we'd be doing, but it's another instance of the "adjusted" exchange rate AND a waiting period of 6 days.

Has anyone else gone through this process? If so, what did you end up settling with?

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