I’ve been watching the value of the GB Pound fall for the past year or so. Once upon a time it was costing something like £640 to buy €900. It seemed like a good idea to me. Recently I’m now paying 90p for €1 making that same €900 cost £810: £170 more for the same amount of Euros. I had a little chat with DelBoy who used to move a bit of money around from time to time. We came to the conclusion that the GBP wasn’t likely to be going up in the foreseeable future only down to maybe £1 = €1 or even as far as €1 = £0.85.
I’ve been using a company called Smart Currency Exchange to make transfers: they took less money for the pleasure of doing business than Barclay Brothers. Whilst looking around on the Internet, I discovered another forex company called TransferWise which offers currency exchange to a number of currencies at good rates as well as a borderless bank account. As you know, with a ‘normal’ bank account there is the bank which is usually in the country where you reside or do business. The account currency is therefore in the local currency. German bank: Euros, British bank: GB Pounds, Japanese bank: yen. This model is different. There is no branch and you can have several accounts in different currencies. Each account has its only local bank details. Your German account has German bank details so that you can receive and make payments locally without having to pay a fee to convert the funds to the currency of your account. Say you live in UK with an account at Barclays Bank but work online for a company in US. You get paid in USD so the UK bank will charge you to change USD to GBP so it can go in your account. Whilst working in US you have to pay car rental and hotel bills which you pay from your UK bank. You are now paying again to change the money back. With this model you don’t have lots of different accounts with lots of different banks but lots of different accounts with the same bank. You only incur charges if you transfer money from one currency account to another. Brilliant!
I got a quote to transfer funds from Barclays to my German Euro account from Smart Currency Exchange and then I got another from TransferWise. Smart only wanted another €700 to make exactly the same transfer! Obviously I went with TransferWise even tough Smart came up with a better quote knocking off €400. It’s surprising what people will do if you only ask. Setting up my account was extremely simple as was transferring the money from Barclays. The Euros should be in my German bank by close of play tomorrow. Smart usually took a week to manage the transfer. Fortunately there are companies prepared to shake up the traditional banking models whereby the only beneficiaries appeared to be the banks!
Tomorrow is the Bank Holiday to celebrate the Dormation of the BVM. The camping is definitely full. In fact I do not ever recall seeing it this full in the previous summers I have been here. There do not appear to be many British here but then holidays in the EuroZone are rather expensive if you’re only now getting €1.10 for every £1.
Other than move money around, I have been removing viruses from a computer in UK and a couple of other small jobs. It has not been that hot, only 36.8C and cooling down quite a lot now. Tomorrow promises to be a nice day but will get windy in the evening.
Time to put the dogs to bed and do Dave.
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