Transferring Money Around The World
Whether you’re going to be studying or working across the globe, a big part of your journey is figuring out how to send money. We want to give you what we think are the fastest, cheapest and easiest ways to transfer money to and fro across this big beautiful world.
Hey friends, welcome to Chine Coaching. I’m Rob and we love helping international students and professionals be successful in their cross-cultural journeys. I’m lucky to have traveled to 30 different countries and to have lived and worked in India for several years. I want to help you figure out this problem of transferring money and give you some really practical solutions.
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Introducing Shreyas Churi
Today we have my buddy Shreyas, who’s an expert on this stuff and has guided many students. Shreyas, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Thank you Rob for the introduction. Hello everyone, my name is Shreyas Churi. I’m doing my masters in Information Technology and Management from Euro Dallas. When I came here in the fall of 2019, I was curious about how to pay my fees and, after I started earning, how to transfer my money back to my home country. These were the questions I had. Thankfully there are tons of options to choose from.
Shreyas has helped make some other videos as well. If you’re curious how to fund your tuition and pay your tuition fees, check out the other video we’ve made. We’ve got some great tips for that.
Juno
Since we’re talking about transferring money and funds, I want to mention Juno real quick. It’s a service that can help you with loans and with finding better interest rates. Juno is a third-party company that assists many students and families around the world with funding their study abroad journeys. They aim to help you get low interest rates, whether you’re a new student taking out a new loan or you want to refinance a current loan for better rates.
They describe themselves as a completely free resource with no obligation, and they believe strongly that strength in numbers can make an impact toward a more affordable higher education system. You can join them to see what benefits are available, including early access to deals and sometimes even the chance to win scholarships. To learn more about Juno and how you can save money, check out the links below.
Exchange & Transfer Rates
So Shreyas, when thinking about transferring money, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
Whenever you want to transfer money abroad or vice versa, the first thing that comes to mind is exchange rates. Every economy has different rates, and you want to get the best rate possible so you can get the maximum amount of money out of it. The second thing is transfer fees, because these can be quite high and depend on the bank and the service you use to transfer money. Among the transfer fees you have Nostro charges, which are 25 by default for every transaction in the U.S. Along with that you have service charges, which vary from bank to bank and provider to provider, and you are also charged some GST when you transfer your money to America. Once you know what exchange rate you want and which service charges and transfer fees are cheapest, you can compare your options.
Wire Transfers
The first option that stands out in this category is wire transfer. So what do you mean by wire transfer? Wire transfer is sending money from your Indian bank account, for example, to somewhere else in the world, such as a U.S. bank account. Sending money from one Indian bank account to another is just a transfer, but a wire transfer is when you send money between two different bank accounts across borders. So how do you do a wire transfer?
How to Achieve Wire Transfer
Wire transfer can be done in various ways. If you are pursuing your education abroad and funding your tuition with an education loan, you can use a wire transfer from the bank that gave you the loan. You place a request at your bank saying you need a certain amount of your tuition wire transferred, and that account has to be a U.S. bank account. You provide the routing number and the account number, and the bank transfers the money based on their exchange rates and transfer fees. It can be available in as little as a day. In Shreyas’s experience, it is usually the cheapest and fastest option for students studying abroad.
Third Parties
The other option is third parties like e-bikes that help wire transfer money all over the world.
Flywire Money Transfer
Apart from wire transfer there’s also a third-party service called Flywire. It is very popular among students who fund their education through student loans back in India.
How Flywire Works
So Shreyas, how does Flywire work for people who are planning to come and study abroad?
On Flywire you create an account and enter the amount of money you need for your semester. Once you enter it, a PDF gets generated at the end, which you can send to the bank that is funding your education, or to your family savings bank, or whichever bank you’re using for the transfer. Once you submit that PDF, the bank takes care of everything. They send the amount listed in the PDF to Flywire, and once Flywire receives it, it sends the money to your university, so you don’t have to worry about anything.
Flywire is a good option for students in their first semester who are skeptical about doing a wire transfer or anything else while they’re coming to the United States. It is secure and fast, but it is a little more expensive than a wire transfer. You need to take that into consideration when choosing this option.
Flywire Without a Bank Account
So a wire transfer is much cheaper, and Flywire is reliable but a little more expensive. Flywire is also a good option for people who don’t have a bank account yet in their study abroad country.
Rightly said, Rob. The students who started online in fall 2020 during the pandemic did not have a bank account here in the U.S., so how could they transfer? For many of them, Flywire was one of the few options for sending money to the United States. It stands out because you don’t have to worry about having a bank account here. You can start your journey back in India as early as you can, and there are students who do an online program from their home country and don’t even come abroad to study. For them Flywire really stands out.
Forex Card Money Transfer
Another popular option I’ve learned about for getting money ready for students is forex cards. How do those work?
Forex cards are a good thing to have when you first fly to a new country, because you can load a certain amount of money onto the card. You can arrive here and cover all sorts of transactions, from Walmart and grocery shopping to your lease payment. Once you have a bank account established, you can transfer all your money from your forex card to your U.S. bank account.
Getting a Forex Card
You get a forex card from your bank. There are lots of different providers. You can get one from the bank that gave you your education loan or from a third party, and they have tie-ups with other banks like ICICI Access or the state banks, so you can have the card with you while you’re flying. We’ll have some links in the video description for good options for wire transfers, bank transfers, forex cards, websites and apps, so be sure to check those out. And if this video has been helpful so far, give a big thumbs up to say thanks to Shreyas.
Cheap & Fast Wire Transfer Options
There are some other great ways that have come up with technology and our smartphones, with apps and third-party sites that let you easily transfer money back and forth, not just to friends but to people and bank accounts across the world. We’re going to cover some of these options, compare the exchange rates and fees, and tell you which ones we think are the best. There are tons of options when we think about transferring money back to our home country.
Wise
The first one that really stands out is Wise. In Shreyas’s view, Wise gives you a great transfer rate along with one of the fastest delivery methods, so you get reliability, speed and the rate you’re looking for. Apart from Wise there are options like Remitly, Western Union, MoneyGram and Xoom, but their transaction fees are higher, or a little higher, than Wise. Wise charges a transaction fee of 3.19 USD per transaction, according to Shreyas, while other services charge as much as five dollars. So you can save money with Wise compared to the others.
Remitly
With Remitly you have options like Express and Economy. Economy tends to come with a slightly higher exchange rate. Wise, on the other hand, does not have two categories. It just has the Express speed category, with an exchange rate equal to Remitly‘s Express rate.
Wise vs Xoom
After comparing everything, we did a direct comparison of Wise and Xoom. Xoom is a service offered by PayPal. They promise it is the fastest, and it is indeed very fast, but they charge a transaction fee of five dollars. We tried a transfer of five hundred dollars with both Wise and Xoom, and in that test we saved around 800 to 900 rupees per transaction with Wise. That’s a lot of money, and if you’re transferring more than that, you would likely end up saving more.
Why Wise Is the Preferred Method
So after looking at all these options, Wise stands out for me. Why is it my preferred method? It used to be called Transferwise, and they recently changed the name to Wise. It’s what I use to send my money to different parts of the world, and there’s a link below if you don’t have an account yet. If you sign up with that link, you get a free transaction of up to 600 without any transaction fees. You’ll save some extra money, and you can share your referral code with friends so you can all get free transfers around the world. Be sure to check that out.
Chai Question: What’s Your Favorite Way to Transfer Money Across the World?
Our chai question for this video is: what is your favorite way to transfer money around the world? Tell us in the comments which way you like best, and which you think is the cheapest or most economical. Maybe we can learn from some other options and help each other out.
Do Your Own Research
One important thing to leave you with: all of this changes all the time, especially currency exchange rates. Do your own research, and test it out before you actually send the money so you know the total you’ll be paying in fees. And don’t forget to check out Juno, a company that may help you get lower interest rates on your study abroad loans, or refinance a current loan for a better rate.
Thanks for Tuning In
Thanks so much for tuning in. Shreyas, I really appreciate you, buddy, and thanks for sharing this valuable information. Be sure to check out the other videos we’ve made with Shreyas, connect online and be part of the Chine Coaching community. Follow us on social media and subscribe so you don’t miss any of our videos. We’ll see you next time at Chine Coaching. Cheers!
