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I'm buying an apartment in Japan (which is where I live), so I need to transfer about $150K from my Bank of America checking account in the US to the apartment building company in Japan. According to the B of A web site, the daily limit on international wire transfers is $1000, so that doesn't sound good. Is there some other way to transfer funds that doesn't have such ridiculously low limits? I don't mind paying fees for the transfer.

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  • what is the limit regarding transferring the funds to your bank account in Japan? Mar 22, 2022 at 10:04
  • Not transferring to my bank in Japan, transferring directly to the bank of the apartment company. They haven't mentioned any limit, so I'm assuming there is none.
    – bubba
    Mar 22, 2022 at 12:12

2 Answers 2

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This is a sizable transaction, so it might be worth your time to research this to minimize fees. The difference between a 10% fee and 0.5% fee in this case will be over $10,000.

I've done transfers of that order from Bank of America to Europe. I use an international transfer account (wise.com in my case, no advertising intended) to minimize fees. So the transfer goes

BoA US -> Wise US -> Wise Europe -> Final destination

Total fees on a large transfer were a little less than 0.5%.

This may be different in Japan, but it's possible. See https://wise.com/help/articles/2932156/guide-to-jpy-transfers

As far as I know there is no limit for BoA ACH transfers to different US accounts. It may be useful to upgrade your BoA checkings temporarily to the highest level of service since this is more likely to waive fees and don't have limits.

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Found an answer myself. As long as it can authenticate you through the numbers on a debit card and a text message to a US phone number, BofA's automated on-line wire transfer system will let you transfer up to $2M. The $1000 limit only applies to folks that they can't authenticate in this way.

I didn't ask about fees, but I've done BofA wire transfers in the past, and don't recall anything especially exorbitant.

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