Well, our American friends did make it. They had two nights on the West Coast instead of four, which was a shame, but then we had a lovely few days together here. Lovely.
Speaking of the difficulty of getting things over the Atlantic, I don't think I ever told you about the woes of getting our money over, when we sold our house in America. It's a bad enough feeling to be paying a monthly mortgage on a house which isn't shifting, but when you've finally sold it, have been to the American Consulate to sign all the papers in front of a notary, and spent an anxious day waiting for the confirmation email from your realtor, the last thing you want to find is that you can't get your money over to join you. That's a very bad feeling.
Before we left the US, we checked with the Bank of America (with whom we'd had a current account for 5 years) how we would get our money over into our UK account. Oh, no problem, they said. Hah. What they hadn't told us was that we would spend hours and hours... and hours... trying to work out how to transfer a large sum of money abroad. Hours spent online, and hours spent on the phone, getting through all their security systems, and trying to speak to an actual human, and then indeed speaking to an actual human or two, before finally admitting defeat. I suppose, to be fair to them, as a bank, you're always setting up systems which have to juggle ease of customer use against security. A tough balancing act. I'm trying to be fair-minded here. The last thing I would have wanted is for someone else to have nabbed that money. However, I have to say that the last straw wasn't the hours of frustration (at least a full working day...), but the fact that ultimately we couldn't even do it - I don't like being ultimately thwarted. It also rankled that we'd taken steps to check in advance, and had been assured there'd be no problem.
I can't even remember all the details, but I do recall that the bank wanted to send us a security code by mobile phone. The mobile phone had to be a US mobile phone. We, of course, didn't have one by that stage. We were working on some cunning plan whereby we gave the number of a friend's mobile phone in the US, and then they emailed us the code, and then we phoned the bank, but there was some reason why we couldn't do that - I can't remember exactly. Foiled again! Whenever we found some possible way, there was always a ceiling which was a few thousand pounds, and having sold a house, we needed a higher ceiling than that. We must have been desperate, because I remember at one point working out with Husband what would be the cost of getting the money out of a cashpoint till in the UK, little by little, over weeks, using our Bank of America debit card. Not a great option, and we worked out it would be hugely expensive.
What we did in the end was to set up an account with a company that specialises in money transfer. It felt a bit risky, but Husband did lots of research online, and the reviews seemed ok. World First worked fine for us. It didn't have that nice, solid, big institution feel to it that Bank of America did, but I guess we're the last generation who will feel emotionally drawn to that kind of big bank for safety. Those big institutions have really let the consumer down over the past decade or so, and they're going to have a lot of competition from people like World First, who we found to be very customer-focused and efficient.
Travelex is another foreign currency exchange company who specialise in international money transfers. I have no direct experience of Travelex, but if you're on the learning curve that we had to climb up, then do yourself a favour and take a short cut. Read some reviews, have a look at some expat chat forums. These new, lean, internet-based companies have a lot to offer the expat.
Disclaimer: For writing this post, I received a small payment from Travelex. The views are my own.
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