Currency exchange

Well, I need to move some money from Canada to the USA, and I got fed up with my bank charging fees and presumably hiding more expenses in their exchange rate. (They refuse to specify their exchange rate ahead of time, and they also refuse to give any information on how it is determined.)

So I have just uploaded $5000 onto a currencyfare.com account. In theory it is supposed to be the ebay of currency exchange, charging a minimal fee to link up buyers and sellers. But they're just ramping up service and building a customer base, so it's likely that they'll be on the other end of the transaction.

I'll update the post when I see how it goes. I was a bit nervous about uploading money to an Irish dotcom company that has Canadian bank accounts (and accounts everywhere else), but I hope that international wire-transfer ripoffs will soon be a thing of the past.

It is somewhat reassuring that there are no adverse comments about them online. (I heard about them on the Motley Fool radio program a few months ago.)

UPDATE: After posting an offer at the the interbank rate of $1.1026 USD/CAD and waiting a day, half of my order was bought. (It must have been a regular Joe on the other end, since currency traders probably don't deal in half of $5K orders very often.)

Currencyfare didn't charge anything, but they'll charge $6 when I wire money out to my US bank account.