Selling house in UK, buying in Dublin

[Mumshire]

Hello,

We are in the process of selling our house in the UK, having made the move to Dublin a couple of years ago (we've been renting in Dublin in the interim). We will soon complete on our sale and will be using the proceeds towards our deposit to buy in Dublin.

Has anyone done this before? How do we exchange the £ into € without losing a ton of cash in currency exchange fees etc? We've already lost a fortune as the sale fell through with first buyer and we were left with a vacant house. Also, the house prices in Dublin being what they are, we need maximum € to ease the pain!

Thanks in advance for any advice!

We found the best way to move £ to € a few year ago was via one of the transfer services. I think we used Wise. It's quite nervewracking as you essentially transfer it to them and they send it your Irish account but it was fine. You need both your UK and Irish accounts to be in the same name I think. It was much better rate than our bank could give us.

We used Wise. Close monitoring of the rates is essential to do it at the right time though and you can save/lose thousands otherwise.

We used Smart Currency back in 2014 and still use them now to set up transfers to convert income from UK pensions into euros. We’ve been using them with zero issues for over 10 yrs now, so happy to recommend them.

To transfer from £ to Au$ we found wise was the cheapest. Not much cheaper than using international transfer with Bank of Scotland but with a house sale purchase even the tiny difference in exchange rate made a couple of hundred $ difference. We just watched the exchange rate over a couple of months while waiting for completion and tried to pick a time when it was favourable to do the transfer... the downside with Wise is the daily limit so we just did it over several different days.