changing up a large amount of Euros

[nick s]

Hi Guys, Sold my elise last night to a man from France. He paid me in Euros, 12,000 of them. Now going on todays exchange rate, it's roughly £10,650 GBP, but when i put 12,000 euros into the post office calculator it says i'll get back £9,700 or so. Obviously this is quite a difference. So i was wondering what peoples advice was to get the best rate? If i pay it straight into my bank account (HSBC) is this likely to be the best option? cheers guys.

[uuf361]

Cash I assume then ?

Most of the high street FX places will neogtiate on their standard rates for such a large transaction so worth a few phone calls to get the best rate.

[bananaman1]

might be worth hanging on to the euros........90.5 pence buys 1 euro at the moment ! was about 84 pence per euro a month or so ago

[Eagerbeaver]

I sold a couple of my cars earlier this year and ended up with a wheelbarrow full of Euros. I too worked out that I would lose a shed load of money if I just banked it. I ended up using a foreign exchange specialist. This is the one I used http://www.cityforex.co.uk/ but there are others. They bank with Barclays so you just pay the cash into their account, 3 days later the money appears in your account. You may want to speculate on the € going down but if you guess wrong on €12K you can end up loosing hundreds in a matter of days. It's up to you whether you want to gamble.

I don't know how safe these specialists are but I had great service from these guys.

[968CS]

Had the same problem when I sold the 993 to a guy in Germany, I found most banks want to charge a commission for handling cash upto 1.5% and then take their cut on the exchange rate as well.

[birdcage]

If you work in a large company, set yourself up as a temparary bureu de change, offering slightly better rates than he high st.

[Eagerbeaver]

I did this and it became a PITA. It's like trying to money launder thousands with people who want a few hundred at a time. No matter what you do it is a PITA and using a large Forex specialist was the smallest pain. I didn't feel comfortable putting thousands of Euros into a strange organisations bank account but it turned out OK at the end of it.

My last bit of advice is if you accept a bankers draft, don't do what I did and open a high street Euro account. By the time I'd done this I would have rather have just lost a fortune on the transfer to £.

Anybody would think that the Euro is a foreign currency

[mcflurry]

Take it to Paris. At EUR9 for a pint of lager it will all be spent in no time