Hi,
I was wondering if there was a convenient way to get foreign currency on your bank account (or cash) after doing a Forex exchange on Interactive Brokers.
Let’s say I’m going on vacation to the US, I buy USD on IB on the Forex platform.
How can I actually get those USD so I could use them on my vacation?
Do I need to have a seperate account in USD? Let’s say I’m at UBS, does that mean I need to have A USD account to be able to transfer that money from IB to UBS?
Would it be the same if I wanted EUR or any kind of currency?
Thanks in advance for your feedback
I think a traditional private account only holds one currency, but you can open others under the same contract. With Postfinance it‘s easy to open a new one for example in USD. the things is then how to get access to that cash in that currency, or you pay a lot to transfer to a foreign bank account.
My choice would be Revolut, there you can have private accounts in different currency. I just don‘t know how it works receiving money, but I‘ve done bank transfers there in £.
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You open a U.S. bank account with a U.S. bank, if you visit the country often.
You pay with your Debit card or withdraw cash from an ATM (Could be an IBKR Debit Mastercard, if you eligible - which you‘re not as a European resident).
Though there‘s not much reason or benefit in doing the currency exchange on IBKR, if it’s for tourism purposes only.
Technically not. You can transfer USD to your normal current account, and UBS will convert them into CHF on arrival. So no point in doing so.
You could also open a USD account with them and transfer to it without UBS converting them. Again, there is little point in doing so, since a USD account in Switzerland isn’t of much use for personal tourism.
The easiest way is probably to just get a Revolut or Wise card and just use the card to pay in your vacation or to let cash out from an ATM.
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Interesting question, but maybe USD is a bit the bad example - as this would have to involve wire transfer which costs.
As said, Postfinance is easy to open an USD account, but not sure if you can easily (cheap) get your USD from that account in your hand.
With EUR, it seems a good idea to move CHF to IB (free), convert it to EUR, and have it put back in your EUR account with SEPA.
I never thought of that but it might be cheaper than using Transferwise.
Not even sure, but can you make a limit FX order in IB? That would be nice as these things are not really time fixed for me.
You can’t. Unless, maybe (I don’t know about PostFinance) they’ll give you a USD credit card that debits your USD account.
You’d still (likely) pay wire transfer fees. And with a card, they could still charge for foreign transaction or ATM fees.
It is, depending on the amount - reason why I switched from using TransferWise to IBRK for monthly currency conversion for EUR.
My rule of thumb on the subject:
Foreign currency accounts are (largely) pointless for personal customers unless
a) they are domestic accounts in the currencies’ country. Or at least allow for incoming and/or outgoing domestic payments, such as TransferWise or Revolut (depending on the country).
b) you intend to keep larger (at least 5-digit) currency balances on them. Again, probably not for most 1- or 2-week holidays.
Thank you - I guess it is like I thought,
The only reason I have a Postfinance USD account is to be able to move some USD dividends out of there - by Transferwise, not by PF’s horrible exchange rates.
And because in the past I had some irregular small income in USD.
But yes, it is mostly empty.