Most cost effective way to regularly transfer funds from the US to the UK?

Question

I've recently moved to the US, but I still own a house and a car in the UK so I need to make regular transfers from the US to the UK in order to pay my UK mortgage. Admittedly I've left it a little late this month so I'm probably just going to make a wire transfer from my BoA account, but I'm not to keen to pay the wire transfer fees every time.

In the UK, there are a couple of so-called currency brokers who tend to be a little cheaper than a bank when it comes to sending larger amounts of money, but we're probably talking about $1500/month here, if that. Some of them do offer regular transfer options, though. Do companies like this exist in the US as well? Any recommendations?

Of course there is always Paypal but I've had issues with Paypal when sending money from one account to another and accessing both from the same computer. That cost me two weeks of shouting at them to get the funds released and I don't want to go through this again.

Answer 1

I have a bank account in the US from some time spent there a while back. When I wanted to move most of the money to the UK (in about 2006), I used XEtrade who withdrew the money from my US account and sent me a UK cheque. They might also offer direct deposit to the UK account now.

It was a bit of hassle getting the account set up and linked to my US account, but the transaction itself was straightforward. I don't think there was a specific fee, just spread on the FX rate, but I can't remember for certain now - I was transfering a few thousand dollars, so a relatively small fixed fee would probably not have bothered me too much.