Sending money to parents in China

[shatterstone]

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a cheap easy way to send money back to parents in north china, previously i have used HSBC, but this was £21 charge, i have tried using moneybookers also, but have had bad expereances with them. Any advice would be appreciated

Thanks

Carl.

[Xiao Kui]

if you can trust your parents send them an ATM card to your account. I don't know how the rates are in England, but I only get charged $2 plus 1% of the total withdrawal each time I use my ATM card in China to access my US account . Of course if you are sending huge amounts that 1% could add up to more than the 21 pound transfer fee you've been paying.

Also, there is sometimes a limit on how much you can withdraw per day depending on the bank. My bank only lets me withdraw 6000 RMB per day from my account while in China.

The ATM machine for Bank of China will only allow you to withdraw 2000 RMB per transaction, but you can make consecutive transactions - i think it's more to keep the machine from running out of cash mid-transaction than anything else.

[Ding Yiyi]

Along the same vein, you could set up a second account with your bank, or another, and shop around for the one with the best rates for conversion.

[elina]

Could you try http://www.westernunion.com/ or http://www.moneygram.com/index.htm, which are used by our overseas customers, it’s fast, there’s no problem so far, the handling charge can be very different from country to country, from bank to bank, from amount to amount, just ask your local agent.

i have tried using moneybookers also, but have had bad expereances with them.

By the way, what kind of bad experience? We’re considering that we might add this payment method on our site, thank you in advance.

[HashiriKata]

If I need to send a small anount of money to China (say, no more than $100 dollars), is it safe to put the money in an envelope and send it by registered mail? Has anyone done this?

Thanks,

[Koneko]

Well, I have never done this before. But you should send a cheque (mark A/C payee only) instead of cash and have it delivered by registered post.

K.

[Lu]

Hashirikata: no, it is not. A lot of mail to China gets lost, and a lot of mail gets opened, and sometimes things are stolen from opened mail. I haven't tried registered mail, but I wouldn't take the risk.

[onebir]

If you need to send money regularly, there are services that let you set up prepaid ATM cards. I think you have to get two, send one to China keep one. Charge your card, transfer funds to your parents & tell them the pin.

There are setup costs, but the transfer/fx fees should make it cheaper that 2 or 3 western union transfers.

This is one service: www.virtualmoneyinc.com

I think you can do something similar with paypal a/cs, but maybe that would require some computer at your parents' end...

[elina]

If I need to send a small anount of money to China (say, no more than $100 dollars), is it safe to put the money in an envelope and send it by registered mail? Has anyone done this?

One of our customers always uses this method to save the handling charge, in these recent maybe 4 years, and once every 3 months. He’s my relative in Indonesia. Through this method, the two parties must trust each other, which means the receiver will not claim to the sender, that he does not receive envelop with the money, if he really does. And the sender will not mail fake USD dollars in the envelop, because the money will not be checked by a bank. Also two parties should be both in big cities, I’m in Beijing, he’s in surabaja, Indonesia, so that it seems that the postal service is comparatively safe (I don’t think there’s absolute safe in this method).

He has ever sent several hundreds of USD dollars each time with two layers of A4 papers packing the money in the envelop through registered airmail, in order to avoid other people seeing the money from outside of the envelop. So far it’s safe. But who knows about the next time. I have seen some people complained there were money lost with this method on a website.

[Xiaohua]

You can also get a confirmation number as well. It will track your mail, and let you know when your parents recieved the money. If they never got the money, then you can track, the money down ad see what happened to it, this also helps to prevent against people saying they never got the money when they really did. It even tells the time they got it. Think about doing that.

off topic question that could have been answered in 1 minute with Google removed