Morning everyone. I'm moving down to the SW of France with my family ut will commute back to London regularly for work. What is the best way? to get regular monthly payments exchanged and transferred from a U.K account to my french one? Graet site!

Well you could use Sun-Pay - Online Global Money Transfers made Easy, but they charge €10 a transfer

Or currencies direct do a system where you have a d/d set up, and at the moment they make no charge

For larger amounts (house purchase) you can also go to ITT moneycorp or HIFX.

You can just use your ATM card to get cash.

You could also try settying up a PayPal account and moving the money there from one account, and then off to the other. I think paypal lets you do that if you call one personal and one business. But then there are fees, too.

The easiest way would probably be to contact your bank and ask them to set up an automatic transfer to your French account. Or maybe if you have on-line banking, you can set up a regular payment.

You could always just haul tons of cash around.

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Given the fees involved, I've found it best to transfer money as infrequently as possible, making large transfers (at least £5,000 or 10,000) each time. The problem seems to be that, with a wire transfer, there is normally a charge at both ends of the transaction - from the UK bank making the transfer and another from your French bank to "receive" the money. You could probably manage on two to four transfers per year.

Besides, you'll need some money in your account in the UK for when you are back in the country.
Cheers,
Bev

I knew there would be charges; lets be honest whenever banks are involved there always are!! No my salary is paid into my UK account each month and I'll need it transferred at that time so will be 12 transactions a year. I wonder whether having the same bank in UK and France would cut down on charges?? Anyway thanks for your help. Anybody know Salies de Bearn well as I think that is where we off to............

I can answer that one - and the answer is no. HSBC exists in both the UK and France but because the banks are covered by national banking law, there is no break on the transfer. Citibank exists in most countries these days, but again, the branches in the different countries are covered by different law and so it really doesn't get you any break from one country to the next.

You may want to look into an account at La Poste (French Post Office) as I am told that their fees are generally pretty low in comparison with most other banks here in France. Not sure if/how they handle wire transfers, but if you don't ask you won't find out. And, once your money is in a French bank, you only have to write a cheques to move it to another account. Transferring between banks runs up big fees unless you just write a check to yourself and deposit it wherever you want it. And, in France (at least so far) cheques are free to have printed up and to use.
Cheers,
Bev

I don't know if this is still true, because there aren't that many small banks left, but it used to be that a small bank worked with what was called a correspondent bank within its own country to handle foreign transactions, thus adding another fee into the structure.

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Great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!