Calis Beach and Fethiye Turkey Discussion Forum

Information and Services in Turkey Section => Banks, Interest, Money Transfers, Insurance => Topic started by: keng38 on October 09, 2015, 16:33:39 PM

Title: sending money from UK to Turkish bank
Post by: keng38 on October 09, 2015, 16:33:39 PM

Just discovered and used an app called transfer wise.
Sent £100 as a test at rate of 445.58 (google rate is 4.5158)
Received 445.58 TL.
Fee was £1.34 !!!

Title: Re: sending money from UK to Turkish bank
Post by: JohnF on October 09, 2015, 16:43:52 PM

The Google rate is way out of date, it's not been above 4.46 for the past twelve hours.

Is it a flat fee or percentage?

JF

Title: Re: sending money from UK to Turkish bank
Post by: keng38 on October 09, 2015, 18:17:49 PM

1% fee minimum 6TL maximum 600 TL
The app gives a live price and exchange rate before you send

Title: Re: sending money from UK to Turkish bank
Post by: villain on October 10, 2015, 14:46:20 PM

I'm a keen student of hammering foreign currency exchange costs down to the absolute minimum. I can confirm that Transferwise is really very good for smallish transfers like this. I used it earlier this year to pay for an apartment rental deposit in Tenerife. You effectively get virtually the spot rate.

Using the desktop PC version, you can also get £10 cashback on your first transfer when you sign up via TopCashBack (less currently from Quidco). Seeing as I only sent about £50, I effectively got an extremely good rate indeed.

Can't remember why, but I found for big transfers (£1000's), you're still better off using someone like FCExchange. I think it's because the fees rise with Transferwise as the size of transfer increases. But with those slight reservations, this service is recommended by me at least.

Whatever you do, though, don't use your bank for these things.