Paying for things whether from home or when on the road has posed some of the biggest difficulties during my travel. The first time I had great difficulties was when I decided I wanted to go to Bhutan and was in Sri Lanka. The travel agency would not accept the standard methods of payment – Paypal or credit car – only a bank transfer would do. But Canadian banks do not do bank transfers to foreign companies from outside the country. They can be done at a bank branch in Canada, but not elsewhere. I eventually withdrew money using ATMs and arrived with cash.
Paypal can have its issues: fees and their security is a problem (you should not store accounts on Paypal, add one each time you need to use the service), but they can be a life saver. Credit cards almost always trigger a service charge of at least 3%, usually more than Paypal.
Before I went to Europe in 2018, I factory ordered a VW California camper van. It cost a great deal especially when paying in Canadian dollars. Paying for it would entail significant fees.
To initiate the factory order, I needed to make a downpayment of 30% of the cost of the vehicle. All payments for this vehicle were to involve using a wire transfer to a bank account of a car dealer in Leipzig Germany. There are two costs involved in a wire transfer: exchange rates and fees to conduct the transfer. I checked out my bank and another bank.
Here are the numbers:
xe.com – 30% of cost of vehicle was 19,148.10 euros or 28,473 CAD (exchange rate 1.4872 which was about .02 percentage point above their actual exchange rate – supposedly their only profit as they charge no fees.
rbc.com – the same 19,148.10 euros cost 29,273 CAD, or exactly $800 CAD more. CIBC offered a no-fee money transfer (in lots of $10,000) but the exchange rate was 1.5339!! or $29,371.27 CAD, not exactly a no-fee transfer.
The transaction was conducted through a wire transfer (just like a bank) to a company listed in Canada. I simply went to my bank account, signed in, added their company as a payee and transferred the entire amount in one go. The payment was linked to a reference number listing my payee in Germany. So maybe they have the cheapest rates to transfer money.
