So we’re at the stage now where every time I get an email I hope to see that we’ve been assigned to a case officer, but alas, it could still be 4+ months if you believe what INZ says. I thought I’d just talk about our first relocating-overseas-logistics challenge to fill up some space. Challenge might not be the right word but it’s attention grabbing so I used it.
So what was this big challenge? As part of agreeing to help us get residency, our immigration agent insisted on us paying for their services. Since they’re located in New Zealand that meant sending money overseas. But how best to do it? It’s something that we’ll have to do at least somewhat regularly I imagine, so I wanted to find the best way. It can be pretty expensive if you don’t pay attention. Since we were paying for a product we had two options: 1) use a credit card, or 2) wire the money internationally to their bank account. If you’ve ever taken a trip overseas and used your credit card, you’ve probably found out that you get charged extra for it. It costs the bank to move money internationally, but being the fee-loving organizations they are, they also see a way to make a little something extra. Now you usually get pretty decent exchange rates, but I found I was going to get charged at least 3% of the total purchase by the credit card company. Sometimes the party receiving the payment wants to tack on 3% of their own. That was looking like an expensive option for simply sending someone money.
The other option is to wire the money through a money transfer company such as Western Union. I’m not sure how good the exchange rate they offered was, but their charge, while not huge, was not insignificant either, I think somewhere between $25-$35. It was better than using a credit card, but those charges can add up over time if you do more than a few transfers.
But those were our options, what can you do… You can be persistent is what! Actually it didn’t take much persistence to discover there are some new players in the international money transfer world taking advantage of all these new interwebs. Xoom was one, but I ended up using Transferwise. It’s only about a year old and the fee seemed way too low to not have some catch (only about $6 for the 1st transfer and the others have been <$10). I was automatically suspicious. I decided to give them a try but was ready to abort at any time when they jacked up the fee or added in hidden charges, but they never came. The money showed up in our immigration agent’s bank account after 2-3 days just fine and I’ve ended up using them for all our transfers so far and been very happy with them. So that’s the tale of our first foray into overseas logistics. This one turned out as a win, but if we get the visa there’ll be much more challenging challenges to de-challenge, so stay tuned.
Kiwi Bound 