How to transfer money from the UK to Spain without huge fees
If you’re buying a house or car in Spain, whether for a holiday home or a more permanent move, you’ll need to end up transferring large amounts of money around.
There can some really high fees involved when you’re transferring money from the UK to Spain, so it pays to understand the best and cheapest ways to do it.
Read on for more details on how to transfer money from the UK to Spain and avoid high fees..
Get a Spanish bank account
Firstly you’ll need to get a Spanish bank account if you want to buy a car or property. This is fairly simple to do and there are many high street bank accounts available for both residents and non-residents of Spain.
Have a look around at the best option for your situation as there aren’t many fee free bank accounts in Spain. The fees will vary depending on how much you pay into the account each month, whether you take out the bank’s insurances, set up direct debits and so on.
BBVA and ING both offer currently offer fee free bank accounts.
Transferring money from a UK bank account to Spain
The easiest way to transfer money to Spain is via your UK bank account. You just need the IBAN for your Spanish account and arrange the transfer either online or in the branch as you normally would.
However, be warned – the fees charged by your Spanish bank to convert pounds into euros can be quite high. This will usually be a percentage of the total transfer amount, our bank Sabadell for example will take 4% of the total amount transferred before converting your money.
This isn’t too bad if the transfer is a one off, but you won’t want to pay a fee every time you pay money into your Spanish bank account.
Using an online money transfer service
The best way to both transfer money easily between the UK and Spain and avoid huge fees, is to use an online money transfer service.
Since we get paid for most of our freelance work into our UK bank account, we use Wise for transferring money from our UK bank account each month for our day to day living expenses, as well for transferring larger sums from our UK savings account when we bought our house and car.
A Wise account is easy and free to set up, with the whole process completed online quickly.
You will be set up with both a UK Wise account and an EU wise account. Once up and running you can transfer the money from your usual UK bank account your new Wise UK account with no charges. The money will be transferred within seconds and you’ll get a notification once it’s all complete.
Within the Wise app all you then need to do is convert the pounds into euros for a small fee. Wise charges a flat fee of £0.20 + 0.41% of the amount that’s being converted.
With a balance of euros in your EU Wise account you can then transfer this to your Spanish bank account for no additional fees at either end.
This transfer will also be complete in seconds so no waiting around or having to talk to anyone at the banks. And most importantly, no high fees.
Want to try Wise for free?
If you want to try Wise and see how easy it is to use, you can sign up via this link.
When using this link to set up your account you can make your first transfer of up to £500 with zero charges.
Other online money transfer services are available such as Revolut, but we’ve found that Wise does the best exchange rates and is the easiest to use.
Happy transferring!
