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What US banks let me do the following:

% Send and receive international wire transfers for free

% Send wire transfers online

% Pay no monthly fees

% (optional) Apply for an account online.

Accounts requiring a minimum balance of up to $50K are fine, but I'm not a student, senior, etc.

I've googled this, but everything I found is obsolete.

I realize I'm asking a lot, but:

http://www.shallowaterbank.com/no_1_cust_chking_accnt.asp

has much of what I want (and is my fallback), so I don't think my requirement list is unreasonable.

6 Answers6

4

I doubt you're going to find anywhere that will give you free outgoing wires unless you're depositing a huge amount of money like $500K or more. An alternative would be to find a bank that offers everything else you want and use XETrade for very low cost online wires. I've used them in the past and can recommend their services. Most banks won't charge for incoming wires.

I have accounts at E*Trade Bank that don't charge any fees and I can do everything online. You might want to check them out. E*Trade also offers global trading accounts which allow you to have accounts denominated in a few foreign currencies (EUR, JPY, GBP, CAD and HKD I think). I don't think there is a fee for moving money between the different currencies. If your goal is simply to diversify your money into different currencies, you could deposit money there instead of wiring it to other banks.

user1175
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TDAmeritrade, an online stock broker, provides banking services within their brokerage accounts. The service offers all of what you are looking for. HOWEVER, this service is only available for free with their "Apex" qualification. Here is a tariff of their fees and services.

rs79
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Since I am having the same question so I made couple of phone calls based on some answers above. The 1st one was TD Amertrade: They don't directly accept money from China. The 2nd one was Charles Schwab: NO FEES to accept the money from China whatsoever! Open an account is free with ACH function and more. Hope it helps for anyone who needed.

Qigongfan
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Check out CitiGold from Citibank. Not sure about incoming international wires but everything else seems to be covered.

Vitalik
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frostbank.com is the closest thing I've found, so accepting this (my own) answer :)

EDIT: editing from my comment earlier:

frostbank.com has free incoming international wires, so that's a partial solution. I confirmed this works by depositing $1 (no min deposit requirement) and wiring $100 from a non-US bank. Worked great, no fees, and ACH'd it to my main back, no problems/fees. No outgoing international wires, alas.

0

The reason banks charge fees for wires, is because the Federal Reserve charges banks to send the wires. The Fed charges the banks a hefty fee, so the banks have to charge you a hefty fee to make up for it.

Any time any business gives you a service for free, its because they think they can make more money off of some other service or product they are selling you. So the question becomes, How can I make myself valuable enough to a bank that they will waive my wire fees?

The account you linked to is a good example of this: the monthly service charge, along with the $0.50 charge every time you use your debit card, would make up for the number of wires most people send.

Benjamin Chambers
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