Transferring money to a U.S. bank from Germany

Hi all, first-time poster here!

My wife and I will be moving to Dresden in July, when I'll begin my PhD program at TUD. I'll need to keep my US bank account open to manage the payment of a small student loan I have. To make regular payments on the loan, I'll have to transfer a small amount each month from my German bank account to my US bank account. I spoke to a rep at my bank here in the US and she said that when they do a transfer to a European bank, they don't charge any fees - they just exchange at the current rate. I'm not holding my breath for any German bank to be so accommodating. I've lived in Germany before, so I'm familiar with the German penchant for charging a fee for everything imaginable. Anyway, I'd appreciate advice and experiences of those who have been in similar situations. If there are no banks who will do the transfer for free, what can I expect to pay per transfer?

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Easiest way (I know) is to join Citibank...they do internal transfers for free (between Citibank a/c around the world). However, Citibank Germany is not as elitist as the UK version which markets to high earners; so the service can be a bit iffy. But with internet banking - you normally don't have to go into a branch and wait in line anyhow. Not sure what Citibank USA is like...

There are no doubt other ways - just wait for the experienced lot on TT to get back to you.

AYou should also try the search function as I'm sure this topic has been covered a few times...

I did do a few cursory searches with what I considered the appropriate keywords for something like this (I also figured it would have been covered), but the search came up empty.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll have to take a look at Citibank. I have a Mastercard through them, but have never thought about them for banking.

I've been with them UK/Germany for a few years ...find the instant transfer between a/c without fees worth it...

Best of luck

My employer makes a monthly transfer for me right out of my paycheck for free -- maybe you could look into that? My bank in the States (Wells Fargo) told me they wouldn´t charge for transfers received, but they seem to forget that every now and then and need a reminder not to do it. For transferring one time, Sparda Bank takes a chunk of change, but I suppose if it were on a regular basis it might be different. International transfers also seem to take a very long time, like weeks. So keep that in mind when making arrangements.

Ok guys, let me tell you what I do. I transferred money through a bank before and it was expensive, I think like 40€ or something. Since I wanted to just send 100-200€ a month I had to find another way. So what I do is use Pay Pal. Sounds stupid but hey, it only costs me $5 and I can do it all online. I have my American Pay Pal account attached to my bank there, and a German account attached to my bank here. Just go to Pay Pal and send myself money...wait 2-3 days and deposit it in my bank in the U.S.

Isn't the internet great?!

PayPal gives you a really crappy exchange rate though. If you only transfer 100-200 euros it might not make a difference, but for larger sums it add's up. If you're only transferring that amount, you'd probably be better off seeing if they can take it off a credit card on the American side each month.

This topic has been covered so many times. Do a search on XETrade, for example. That's what I use to transfer money without fees (to speak of).

I'm also with Wells Fargo. They charge me $10 to receive the international transfer. I'm not sure why they wouldn't charge you anything, so I think the person you spoke to has no idea &/or experience with int'l transfers. It HAS to cost something! It would be great to know how you remind them NOT to charge you anything. How do you transfer your monies from Germany? With Postbank, they give me two options (1) with bank code or (2) SWIFT. I do (1).


Agree!

I have Postbank, I do my international money transfer online & it only cost me €1,50, but I have to do a BEN transaction, so any fees incrued will be charged to my US bank account (Wells Fargo). This turns out to be $10. I tried in vain to have the fees paid on my side here in Germany, but that did not work. Postbank said they cannot control what happens in the U.S. even though I checked the correct box!

Dunno, I called and said I am transferring every month and they said they wouldn´t charge me. Some months later I called up and asked why they were charging and they said sorry and stopped. Don´t know why, but they do it for me. But that´s just for receiving, mind you.

I've experimented with a few ways of transfering USD to EUR in the last few years.

I have a Citibank US and a Citibank Germany account. I got these because a few years ago it was easy to do transfers between these two. Now it is not so easy. Citibank USA has stopped allowing people to use their "Inter-Institution Transfer" feature online; you have to go into an ATM in the US to use it (some good that does me). However, looking back at my old transfers, they always used to charge me about 3 cents per US dollar, plus 10 US dollars fee.

I signed up for XEtrade last week, because I have to transfer quite a bit of money. It was a bit of a laborious process, involving sending them images of my American driver's license and having a phone interview with them. They don't charge a fee (other than the about 16 bucks for wiring the money to your German account), but their rate is consistently over 2 cents more than the Yahoo Financials rate. And it takes several days for them to transfer the money.

So now I'm back to my old system: walking into Citibank, taking money out of the ATM, walking over to the counter, and depositing the money in my Citibank account. This is a pain in the ass, but Citibank charges no fee, and their rate is consistently within half a cent of the Yahoo Financials rate. However, I have a daily limit of 1000 USD per account (they let you access 2 accounts on the ATM, one Savings and one Checking, but they let you transfer between them at the ATM).

There are a few gotchas you have to observe. The limit is per business day and the cutoff is, I think, sometime early in the morning New York time, which translates to late morning Germany time. All of the weekend counts as part of Monday. If you suddenly start taking large amounts of money out, they may lock your account until you talk to someone in India and have them unlock it AND put a note on the account that you'll be taking out lots of money from Munich (or wherever) in the near future.

So in the next couple of weeks I have to bicycle downtown about 12 or 13 times to transfer money to help my mom pay for her brand-new garage spot in Berlin (below her brand-new apartment). But it saves us hundreds of dollars and our money goes instantly from my American account to cash in my hand to my German account - it doesn't spend 3 - 7 days "lost in the ether".

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone. So far it looks like Citibank is the way to go, since they don't charge a fee and they seem to give the best exchange rate.

sounds the most complicated thing to me, then again. the above example was USD -> EUR, not exactly the way you want it.

yeah, but the first reply (from Stanford) seemed to support the EUR->USD idea, and online to boot.

he was also talking about Citibank.

I guess I read through Hepat's post too quickly, and I guess I was confused by the later mention of "Citibank charges no fee...". I guess I'll contact Citibank USA directly to clear things up.

Paypal is very cheap to use when you have to transfer small amounts on a regular basis. That's what I did when I was in Germany to transfer money back home to pay bills there. You're basically paying them the difference between their exchange rate and the interbank rate. For larger amounts, it's best to send money via wire transfer. At least, those are the best options when you don't have a Citibank account back home, which I did not.

I switch money from my sparkasse account to my B of A account every so often. It takes about three days to do it and i get charged about $ 10 dollars. There are better and cheaper ways to do it but I am more watchful of my b of a account so it is easier for me to account for my money. I need to marry a cute CPA.

Sorry, I missed the directionality in the original question. The point I was trying to make, though, was that almost everyplace seems to hide fees in the spread between the "real" exchange rate and the one they give you. Unfortunately it's often hard to find out what this is until you already have gone to the effort of setting the system up. That happened to me with XEtrade- it turned out that their rate was really not as good as I had hoped.

Citibank does have a generally quite nice online banking system (both in the US and here in Germany; the US one is less annoying to use in general, but tries to do more, and sometimes fails). For most things they're pretty tolerant of customers doing things from outside the US, and even customers who hardly ever are in the US.

Exactly. Its very hard to find this out almost 100% of the time. The banks/institutions seem to make it out as if this is an irrelevant point. Even a lot of people think its irrelevant, and don't bother checking whereas its actually the most important point! People think they get a good deal when the bank only charges them $10 for a transfer, but they don't notice they are getting done on the exchange rate.

Even XETrade.com, who do this for a living, couldn't provide me with real time rates that I would actually get for the transfer. They assured me it was good, so I signed up. Even when in their interface, I had to start doing a transfer to find out the current rate. Only then did I find out their rate is pathetic - at least 2 points off the real rate. All that hassle for nothing. They all love to hide it until the last minute, and often don't tell you anyway.

PayPal is another one. I had to actually transfer the money before I could find out what rate I was getting (this was 2 years ago, I don't know about now), they simply didn't mention the rate at all - only how much in local currency I wanted to send. And their rate was truly bad. Way worse than XETrade. For small amounts maybe, but I wouldn't use them for anything else.

agreed. i did paypal for about a year because the international transfer offered by my bank was a rip off. the best way is really for someone you trust in the u.s. to withdraw the money with a cash card you give them & have them deposit that amount into your u.s. bank account. not only do you really have to trust someone, but what a hassle from someone ont he u.s. side if they have to do it regularly like i need done.

Great. I was starting to lean toward PayPal until those last two posts. Thanks for the info.

Not true. I used Paypal for three years. When you put in the amount in local currency, it tells you what it's converting it to in the currency you're sending. From that and some very basic math skills, you can calculate the rate. When I did it, the difference between Paypal's rate and the interbank rate what about 0.04. So it ended up costing around €4 for every €100 I transferred (which is about the amount of my transfers).

Just out of curiousity...how do you get Euros *into* your PayPal account from your German bank? Do I simply set up my German bank as one of my bank accounts? Are there fees there (presumably from the German bank side)? I've used PayPal for eBay stuff, but I've never done any sort of international transactions with them.

i'm a new expat who recently setup citibank accounts in germany and the USA for the exact same reasons. so far, i have not found a way to send my money from germany to the USA using global transfers. as previously noted, you can no longer do this from citibank USA websites. the option is there in the german website, but no matter which US citibank i choose, i get a message saying it can't transfer to that account.

is there ANYONE out there successfully sending money from citibank germany to citibank USA right now? i hope i didn't setup both of these accounts for nothing.

Have you tried calling them? I didn't transfer to Citibank USA but I had problem transferring to my credit card issued by Citibank Singapore initially because Citibank Germany is asking for the bank account & Citibank SG is saying that's my credit card number. ANYWAY, I was told that this transfer can only be done via telephone or over-the-counter banking, not online banking. I did it & my bill is paid. They (Citibank Germany) told me it's free to transfer to any Citibank in the world, and my bank statement shows no charges.

Here's a service fee table from Citibank Germany (in German)

Hi,

What are the best options for transferring a large sum from a German bank account to a US bank account without incurring a large fee or a very bad Euro to Dollar conversion rate?

Thanks.