Hopefully, someone can help. About a week ago, I sent a fair amount of money to Brazil via a bank wire transfer to buy a property.
Let’s call it $100,000 just to make it easy. It turns out that you need all this documentation just to release the money into my wife’s bank account. After putting it all together, the Bank here in Brazil tells us that the buy rate for brazilian reals is 1.67.
So my $100,000 would buy 167,000 Reals.
Their sell rate is 1.79. Meaning I would need to pay 179,000 Reals to buy $100,000 US.
The spot rate on the exchange markets today is 1.739.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=USDBRL=X
with a bid of 1.739 and an ask of 1.740.
That means that the bank is charging 4% BEFORE fees to exchange the money.
I told them to send the money back to my US account.
There has to be a better way.
I’ve been Googling and calling different places for the last 2 hours. Forex.com said of the brazilian Reals "we don’t deal with exotic currencies like that". Exotic? It’s the 5th largest country on the planet!
All of the Currency exchange specialists seem to be based out of the UK (maybe it has something to do with the term?). I called HiFX and the guy on the phone says "I know we have it on our website, but we don’t deal with brazilian Reals."
WTF?!?
The idea of being raped for thousands of dollars just to exchange my money makes me sick to my stomach. It’s not that $5,000 or $10,000 one way or the other changes my quality of life, it’s just the principle of the matter. I worked hard to make this money and paying that much to exchange money is just wrong on a gut level.
I need a solution.
If you can find me a solution so I can exchange $100,000 or more US dollars for Brazilian reals in one transaction for something much closer to market rates (like around 1.73ish) and without a hefty commission, I’ll send you $100 via paypal.
