How to Send Money to Your Interactive Broker's account for free

Haha, yeah I already experienced the super rude and stupid IB consultants. Wanted to punch that guy in the face over the phone. If I were you, I would not use an account number found on the forum (even though it’s correct). But if you use the new user interface, you will be able to see the Swiss IBAN. There even was a screenshot somewhere on the forum.

2nd question: as far as I know, IB lets you have one free transfer from the account per month. And that’s regardless of the destination country. The next one costs, but I don’t know how much. Just google for the fees, it’s not so hard.

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Many thanks. Just one question. I see that Lynx has a flat fee of 4USD for converting CHF to USD (up to 100 000USD). It uses the same interface as IB. Since most of you will follow the 4% rule, I am wondering why it is not mentioned within the forum. The cost of transaction in the US is approximately 5USD but then you would save approximately 35 USD on converting currency costs (considering 40k on 1million) or am I missing something? Also no custody fee (even below 100K)

I haven’t thought about how I will organize myself once I have a million :stuck_out_tongue: . But I’m definitely not going to make monthly withdrawals. I will probably keep at least 10% of my wealth on a bank account and when I run low on cash, I will sell some stock and withdraw it together with the accumulated dividends. So probably one-two payouts per year. And who knows if I will need CHF or PLN or EUR, or maybe even USD and then I don’t even need to convert.

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Which IB account/IBAN do you send the USD to?

Hello everyone. I actually successfully transferred USD to IB via TransferWise. You will get an error on TW when trying to fill in the Account Nr. as IB will provide an Virtual account number that includes the Account ID. Since the account ID of IB starts with a letter, TW doesn’t support letters in the account number. I contacted IB support and it turns out that you can just use the first part of the account number and use the reference text to fill in the details of your account ID for that transaction.

Only thing is that the money arrived on the next day but the deposit is on hold for 5 days before I can use it to trade. Going via TW allows me to save a few cents on small deposits. I am now trying to pay directly via Swiss bank account in CHF.

Just one question: If you sent CHF and you want to buy USD based funds do you need to convert manually the balance in your account via a Forex trade? If so how does it work?

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Yes.

You can follow the steps bojack described here:

If the base currency of your account is USD, you can follow the steps as described.

If it is in CHF, you need to “discount” the commission fee when converting, as I said here:

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Hi Folks,

I just wanted to transfer again some CHF to my IB account, and this message popped up before I could do the details for the transaction.

“ CHF carries a negative interest rate as imposed by the relevant central bank. This means that you will actually pay interest to keep this currency with the broker rather than earning interest (this is because the broker, in turn, must pay interest to the banks in which it keeps client funds denominated in this currency).”

I made a short calculation, and meant: I’d pay 30 CHF (according to the actual rates in the IB calculator) for transferring/keeping my money in CHF, at a transfer of 2000 CHF.

Anyone experienced already this? How to handle with it? I don’t want to loose money at a transfer. After a succesful transfer of course the CHF will be changed to USD

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Somewhere it says that the negative interest is valid for amount bigger than 100kchf.

And even if there was no 100k limit (there is but let’s assume there isn’t), you wouldn’t pay close to that. The interest rates are annual, if you hold the balance for one day you’d be charged a tiny fraction of 30 CHF (less then 0.1 CHF).

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Thanks guys, that makes sense. Have a nice weekend! :sunny:

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Just out of curiosity: how did you get 30CHF?

Here is a calculator, where I just put the amount:

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=interest&p=schedule1

Did you perhaps use the wrong calculator?

When I put 2000 into the " Interest Paid to You on Positive (Credit) Cash Balances" calculator I get 0 but in the " Interest Charged on Margin Loans" I get 30.

Thanks for this thread! I found exactly what I was looking for. I thought wiring funds to the London Citibank account would be considered as an international payment but apparently it is a domestic operation for Swiss banks.

I’m still undecided whether I’ll open an account at IB.
Does anybody of you know how to withdraw money from the IB account in CHF back to my CHF account in Switzerland for free? I assume this is a SWIFT transaction and either IB or the receiving bank in Switzerland will put charges on this.

“One free withdrawal is allowed per calendar month. After the first withdrawal (of any kind), subsequent withdrawals using this method will incur a fee of CHF 11.00”

Do check with your receiving bank. As for correspondence banks in-between, while Swiss banks and IBKR should be well-connected, maybe you can’t rule it out. Shouldn’t be a deal-breaker though, in my opinion.

In my case, I am making regular withdrawals via SEPA - for which a subsequent withdrawal will only cost EUR 1.00. So I’ll better make sure that they come last in a month. :wink:

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Hi all,
I’m wondering if someone else had a similar experience.
I’m with Migros Bank and used the CH IBAN (CH20 8909 5000 0105 6967 4) to transfer CHF from Migros to IB.
Migros told me that it would cost 5 CHF because the IBAN may be ‘Swiss’ but the receiving bank is most definitely not.
And they charged 5 CHF.

Using postfinance it is free.

Sure, but it’s not trivial to amass 25k CHF at PostFinance with the risk that their payments policy change suddenly as well.

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UBS doesn’t charge me anything.

Yes, receiving bank is not swiss but payment goes through same gross settlement system as payments to any other swiss bank, i.e. from one bank’s account at SNB to another bank’s account at SNB. It doesn’t actually cost them any extra in the end. They just feel like charging you more. Deal with it or vote with your feet/capital.