Paying For Our Fifth Wheel

As we all know going on a short holiday overseas and arranging your money these days is pretty straight forward, you duck down town get some Aussie dollars converted to US dollars or what ever currency you need, let your bank know you will be overseas and to expect overseas transactions on your credit card. One of the safest options is a Travellex card, basically a debit card in your required currency. Of course with these options you pay a fee or you convert at a lesser rate and the bank skims the difference to cover their costs. This is a great way to do short term, however in our instance, that is 12 months, the amount we would pay in fees/commissions would be rather excessive.
I did not want to pay the exorbitant fees the banks charge not withstanding the woeful exchange rates they offered.
As usual the Internet came to the rescue and after some research I found an Australian site Ozforex Foreign Exchange Services, generally they do transfers to the US for a cost of about 1% off the current advertised rate and transactions greater than $10,000-00 are fee free.
I spoke to them and signed up straight away, and from memory my first three transactions were free. I was initially hoping to transfer amounts into my Travellex card but they only do transfers to bank accounts, no problem I will just open a US bank account or so I thought?

Not harping on 9/11 to much but once again since 9/11, doing so much in the US appears to require you to jump through dozens of hoops! (don't know how all the illegal Mexicans do it). To cut a long story short unless you have US social security number (SSN) your pretty much up the creek without a paddle, with a Limited Liability Company (LLC) your fine but to my knowledge this is about it until I was trolling through forums and found out that HSBC Bank might be able to help. The deal is you open an account with them and once you have banked with them for 3-6 months they will arrange an introduction to their US Company, and of course there is a fee $250-00 and they do not guarantee acceptance. Well we opened an account as it was our only option. Then a week later my brother in law advised us that we could open a joint account at his bank, we just had to provide our passports when we arrived, fantastic, problem solved.

To actually pay for the trailer Holmans provided me with their bank details and I did a direct transfer through Ozforex. They provide great service, you put your order in and within 15 minutes they rang to confirm it and that was 1-15 am in the morning. The next step is to Bpay the funds to Ozforex and it's all done, I had confirmation from Holmans 36 hours later, the trailer was now ours.


- Posted by RnR on their IPad

Location:Brisbane