Thrilling, scary, nerve-wracking, time consuming; all could be said of making plans to move to another country. You could perhaps throw in tedious, time consuming and costly as well. The ‘big move’ is clearly one of life’s more challenging but hopefully one of life’s most rewarding undertakings. Within it there is an aspect that can be entirely overlooked until the last minute and something that can be a major challenge in itself but, managed well, it can be very rewarding indeed.

Sadly it is true, shopkeepers in Australia don’t like being handed Pound notes and neither do New Zealand car dealers or Canadian real estate agents. What they want is their local currency so you; sad to say, will have to sell your old money and buy new money when you migrate. Whether you like it or not, you will have to change all your worldly money from Sterling into another currency.

The answer to that is to recruit a currency expert to help.

You may wonder why you should bother when banks can send funds anywhere in the world and ‘they do currency exchange don’t they?’ Well yes they do but there are other aspects to exchanging larger sums that you should be aware of. Banks are excellent sources of funds if you are exchanging cash for the trip and first arrival ‘walking about money’ but a specialist currency dealer will be better placed to offer much more attractive exchange rate than banks can offer; an improvement in comparison with the rates quoted on web sites; the so called ‘interbank rate’. This is the exchange rate that banks use to trade with each other in multi-million Pound amounts. As with any wholesale market, the price banks pay will be cheaper than the rate being offered at the retail end of the market; through a high street branch for example but specialist brokers cut out a lot of the ‘middle man’ costs and can afford to be more keenly priced.

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