You may recall that a CL reader in Switzerland, found a statue of St. Lawrence for our home. It costs roughly $400. I’m trying to find a good way to get the money to Jeff, as the shopkeeper selling the statue does not take credit cards. I can wire the money to Jeff via Western Union, but it costs $42.
If that’s the only option, so be it, I’ll pay the fee. Before I do that, I wanted to prevail upon you smart Catholic Light readers to see if you could think of a way to save me a few bucks (or Swiss francs, in this case.)
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Does Jeff have a U.S. bank account, someone handling his financial affairs in the U.S., and an atm card? If so, you could write a check to be deposited to his account here in the U.S. and he could then withdraw the swiss franc equivalent with his atm card there. (As a priest doing graduate studies in Rome, I have to do this kind of thing fairly frequently, and it works fine as long as you are fairly sure of the exchange rate.)
If a one-week wait is not unreasonable, you could snail-mail traveler’s checks at almost no cost. You could snail-mail cash too, but that’s risky, obviously. Traveler’s checks are insured and as good as cash. And I can’t imagine, Eric, that in Washington it’d be any difficulty to get travelers checks denominated in Swiss francs. (Stop by Reagan National on the Metro into/out of work one day. And Swiss Air flies out of Dulles so someone there might be able to help you. Or go by the foreign-currency exchanges I seem to remember are near the place you used to work. Or surely there’s an AmEx office downtown, or your own bank might even sell foreign-denominated checks.)
When I was living in Augusta, Ga., I needed to get a birth certificate from the Scottish Registrar in Edinburgh. The only way I could do it was to advance snail-mail a money order *denominated in pounds.* The only bank that could do this in Augusta (Wachovia) charged a fee that was twice the worth of the money order.
Besides what Father said, the other alternative would be to transfer the money directly from your bank to his bank. He would need to give you his bank’s routing code and his account number. I did this once to get a Christmas-gift tape of a movie that has never been shown in North America from its studio-distributor in Russia (the bank account was in Switzerland, natch). There is a fee for this sort of transaction, I do know, but I don’t remember how it compares with Western Union.
It is my understanding that “PayPal” can be used to send money to anyone who has an email address. I use it frequently to buy things from Canada. But because I am the money sender, I don’t know the fees for the money reciever.
Father, I did think of that option, and I’ll see if Jeff can do it. However, I think he said he uses a Swiss bank. (I am tickled by the idea of wiring money to a Swiss bank account — so James Bond!)
Victor, your idea of mailing travelers checks seems sound to me. There has to be someplace around the Entity that can mail Swiss francs.
Anna, you were thinking the same thing I was — and although PayPal works in 45 different countries, Switzerland isn’t one of them. (I noted that there are a plethora of ways to get cash back to Mexico, however!)
If I can’t get travelers checks or a money order denominated in francs, maybe I can get it in Euros, which I believe are readily accepted at Swiss banks. I’ll let everyone know how we finally work things out.
We do quite a bit of money operations with family all over. I´ve found the best is to try a bank that has accounts in both countries. The transfer fees then are actually quite low, and can arrive sometime even immediately. If we can do that between Spain and Peru, I´d imagine there must be a possibility in US and Swiss. On the other hand, u could open a joint bank account, and send him the ATM card to withdraw the money that u deposit.
I have used Paypal to send and receive money from people outside of the US. They do charge a percentage of the money sent, but it is to the recipient. So maybe you could account for that and pay him the $4 or so Paypal will likely extract.
Do you know anyone in the US Embassy over there…does Jeff??
At Christmas, my mother snail mails me American Express travellers cheques. They are denominated in US dollars, she pays a fee, and then I can exchange them for sterling at any American Express office in London.
Atlantic, do they start off as “checks” and then once they get to the UK, they become “cheques”? I’ve always wondered about that.
I bet some folks down on the Hill would know how to transfer funds to a Swiss bank account. I’d personally be nervous about asking them, though.
To Atlantic, that’s right “checks” in the USA becomes “cheques” in the UK. But the two words sound the same so you won’t get any weird stares over there.
Puzzled:
As long as the other party is cooperating, transferring money to a Swiss bank account is the simplest, most-unglamorous thing in the world to do (as simple and unglamorous as transferring your own money from checking to savings). As I said above, I did it when dealing with Intercinema, the Russian distributor of the BRAT gangster movies. They faxed me an invoice (I don’t know if I still have it) with the relevant info and I took it to my own bank, paid my bank a fee, they transferred the money (all the terms and numbers on the invoice apparently were perfectly clear to a banking professional), and it was over in five minutes.
And then when they get on the Continent, they become Czechs.
do they start off as “checks” and then once they get to the UK, they become “cheques”?
Yes, but if you really must, you can call them cheqs. ;-)
Eric, are you the son of John Johnson, artist, last address known to me in Lockhart, Texas? If so, please contact me. Thanks.