Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

This post is more for information for other travelers than it is for an update on how we’re doing. We’ve reached the point where we are looking to send money that we’ve been making in Korea home to our bank in Canada. We’ve done our research and made our mistakes so I thought we should share our experience.

Your options for sending money home are really quite limited. You can do it a couple of ways but each way you have to pay fees to both the Korean bank and the Canadian bank. The other concern is the rate of exchange.  Brynn’s school requires her to bank at Shinhan bank.  Shinhan does not deal with Canadian dollars.  This means that we must withdraw the Won from there and take it to Korean Exchange Bank (KEB) to exchange it for Canadian dollars.  KEB is much more ‘foreigner friendly’ and employ English speaking tellers, this means you can sort of talk things out before sending your hard earned money off into the void between banks.

Exchange:

We’ve found that we get our best exchange rate in Korea at the Korean Exchange Bank (KEB). KEB works with most major currencies and gives good exchange rates for expats. The Canadian banks seem to want little to do with the Korean Won.  You can lose a lot in the exchange so you have to keep an eye on current rates and time your transfers.

Fees:

You can expect to pay 15,000 Won (This is slightly higher for amounts exceeding 2 million Won – updated 01.22.10) to KEB to send money to Canada.  This is a set fee for either a wire transfer or a bank draft.  Your Canadian bank will also take their cut of $40 upon arrival.  The Canadian fee also applies to either a wire transfer or bank draft.  (This is actually $50 for a bank draft compared to $15 for a wire transfer. – updated 01.22.10)

Our first attempt to send money home we thought that sending a bank draft would be the best option.  We were under the assumption that this option would tally up fewer fees.  As it turns out the fees are the same as a wire transfer. (updated 01.22.10) When your Canadian bank receives the bank draft they must send it to their ‘collections’ department to receive the funds.  This process takes 4-6 weeks. (In our case this took 6 business days. – updated 01.22.10) After talking to both banks further they both agree that the best option is to set up a wire transfer of Canadian funds from KEB to the Canadian bank.  Luckily KEB being ‘foreigner friendly’ allows you to set this up via online banking.  Next time we send money we will be using the online wire transfer (or we could just go to the teller and set it up).  (KEB suggests that you set up your first wire transfer through the teller and if it works fine they can lock in the route.  In our case a wire transfer takes 1 business day. – updated 01.22.10)Our bank in Canada (RBC) says that there is nothing that can be done about the fees and that in order to limit the amount we fork over our only option is to send money home less often.

Hopefully this information is handy for anyone looking to make a similar transaction.  Live and learn.