[patcherific]

I must be a true idiot but hopefully there is someone else out there that has been in my predicament. Has anyone ever had difficulty simply wiring money from their home bank account to their new account in HK? What is the typical process? I have called my home bank (Bank of America) and they state that I need to go to the branch office here, although the branch here isn't for personal business. The HK branch states so and basically tells me they cannot help. I need a large sum of money from my bank account to pay for housing deposits, and I cannot get enough out of the ATM due to limits on withdrawl amounts. I've even tried Western Union to send the money to myself (no can do) and then to a friend (sure, but need cash!).

Where did i go wrong?? UGH so frustrating. Any advice is welcome.

[akqjt]

You might have to make that flight back across the Pacific. I have BoA in the States too and I've never found a way to transfer money online. That's why I'm so happy with my HSBC Premier account; I set it up a couple weeks ago and today I made my first international transfer (hopefully it goes through).

Sorry I couldn't be of further help; good luck to you and let us know if you do figure something out.

[patcherific]

Thanks for your response!

You're right - I need to fly back to get my money! Turns out that it's pretty much impossible to do the wire transfer with BoA unless I can go to their branch. I ended up getting my daily ATM withdrawl limit increased, so that's been helpful and I guess will allow me to get what i need over the course of a few days. I think I got that idea from some historical post here on the site so thank you all!

[Football16]

Originally Posted by patcherific

Thanks for your response!

You're right - I need to fly back to get my money! Turns out that it's pretty much impossible to do the wire transfer with BoA unless I can go to their branch. I ended up getting my daily ATM withdrawl limit increased, so that's been helpful and I guess will allow me to get what i need over the course of a few days. I think I got that idea from some historical post here on the site so thank you all!

I had a similar problem but I am from Canada and before I could get a local bank account in HK, here is what I had to do. What I ended up doing was getting my wife to give the money to someone with an HSBC account in Canada and one in HK here and she transferred the money to a trusted business associate.

The US of course may be a totally different system given their level of paranoia in recent years.

[patcherific]

thanks for the suggestion - it really should be much easier! lesson learned. bring cash

[dean-dzai]

Can't you withdraw cash from the ATM? For me to wire money costs a fair amount, but to take out my max amount of cash from an ATM several times - I am stung for just over $30 HKD each ATM withdrawal each time however, so I take out large amounts.

Surly it works at an ATM, they support so many cards.

[KnowItAll]

Asking your employer to advance you the funds for things like deposits might be an option you want to look at.

[PDLM]

Originally Posted by dean-dzai

Can't you withdraw cash from the ATM?

You won't find many ATM cards that would let you withdraw say HK$150,000 (the sort of sum you might need for 2 months deposit, one months rent, and the agent's half a month and some setup costs) in a short period in a foreign country.

[patcherific]

That's exactly the problem I ran into - I couldn't get enough money out of the ATM in any one day to get what I needed. However, i managed to get my realtor/landlord to agree to allow me to pay the deposit by next Friday and got the bank to increase my daily ATM withdrawl limit. At the end of it all, I think I'm going to shell out at $1550 in ATM fees. I did find out that HSBC charges the highest fee but also lets me take out the largest sum at once. I'm now an expert in the ATMs around central- well at least i'm an expert in something

[PDLM]

Another option that worked with my UK bank (NatWest) was to set up a "fax indemnity" before I left the UK. Essentially this meant signing an authorisation that they could accept instructions from me by fax. I guess not all banks / banking regimes will allow this but worth investigating if your home bank still hasn't made it into the internet age.

If you have the assets to meet their criterion and they are in your home country then I reckon HSBC Premier is pretty much unique, and international transfers are free once you have Premier set up in each country (which is trivial to do once you meet the Premier criterion in one country).