best exchange rate

To all of you north of the 49th. Who did you find gave you the best exchange rate? Im about a week away from purchasing my Isham tool kit and just curious if something is better than Visa? Looking forward to your responses.

Trevor

I don't know specifically about Canada, but my experience moving sizeable chunks of money to and fro with the UK:

Credit and debit cards charge about 3% on top of the mid-market rates.

Paypal now do a reasonable service a bit more competitively.

Banks seem to be uncompetitive.

Best rates usually with exchange brokers on the larger sums. I've used Baydon-Hill, but maybe worth trying the on-line brokers like xe.net. Rates work out about 1% over market plus wire fees.

VBCE

I saved nearly $1,000 over what my bank was going to charge me on a ~$45,000 exchange from Cdn to USD when buying my -4..

Vancouver Bullion and Currency Exchange, 800 West Pender, Vancouver. Google them.

I have no relation to this organization, just a happy customer.

Try xe.com

I recently did some transactions from Australia to the US and got great rates from WWW.XE.com.

Give it a try and it might work out for you, I think I got to within about 1point something of the interbank rate.

Peter

Exchange

Three names to try
Continental Money Exchange. Blue Water, and Forex.
Google them and find an office near you. They are WAY cheaper than the banks even if they give you the "preferred" rates. Small orders I just use the credit card and let them make the spread. Orders over $1000, I go to the Currency brokers.

Visa and Mastercard actually have pretty good rates. It is the extra foreign transaction fee charged by the card issuing institution that bumps up the cost. Visa rates can be seen at http://www.visacemea.com/uv/exchange_rates.jsp and Mastercard at https://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/cardholderservices/currencyconversion/index.html . The Mastercard site gives additional information on how the rates are calculated and when the rate is applied to your purchase.

It may be worth checking to see if there is a card available in your particular country that does not charge this extra fee. I have an Australian Mastercard like this and I pay the published rate (as above) and no more on purchases from overseas.

Fin
9A
Australia

I usually use my Visa card. They charge 1.8% for currency exchange but with my no-fee card, I get 1% back in bonus dollards I can use to buy anything from gift card to financial products....

So in the end, I only pay 0.8%... The exchange rate is around 0.5 to 1% higher compared to what I would get on Forex... so it's not too bad.

My bank also offer a Visa card with a annual fee of $110. It has a bunch of stuff inclusing 2% cash back reward on purchases made in other currency. It covers more than their fee.. and it gets very close to the actual forex exchange rate...