Woohoo for all the PayPal knockers out there

[pepper]

We're dead chuffed with them at the moment!

We've been sending our money via Abbey for the past two years and they've been charging us £25 per transaction with Credit Agricole charging us €2.50 for receiving it, its cost us a fortune!!

Well we decided that I had a Paypal account here and if Judith set up an account on our French bank account then we could send money to and fro between us, last night we did it for the first time and the charge worked out at £2.50 (I said it was personal for paying household bills as I'm not lying)

What a difference though, I'll quite happily pay £2.50 per transaction thats fine with me indeed!

We have kept every single charge Abbey have made to us and if we ever get the judicial review over with Mr MoneySavingExpert.com then I reckon we'll try getting percentage of those charges back as they are a total rip off!

 

[paulandpat]

Must admit we have never done this yet although we have a Paypal account in both countries. Once a certain amount of money has been put through the french account you will probably get an email from them requesting all sorts of extra information, it caused us a few problems because the office is in either Luxembourg or Belgium and works only continental hours. When I tried to get around it on a Saturday morning by ringing the UK office I was put through to a charming young lady in the midwest of America who was totally bemused when I said that they only worked Monday to Friday and 9 - 5!
We use Paypal a lot and have always found it excellent, we have several clients who use it to pay us and have never had any problems.
A couple of other things to bear in mind, if you have an account in France and accept a cheque drawn in Euros from another EU country you may still get charged to pay it in.
To transfer larger amounts of money (anything from the high hundreds of pounds upwards) it is nearly always beneficial to use a currency exchange company, who will give you a better rate and not charge for the transfer, we have used and recommend www.firstratefx.com if you use them tell them the recommendation came from Paul and Pat at Les Bons Voisins, (www.lbvfrance.com) - it keeps us well in with Judy their french representative.

 

[pepper]

Cheers for the information, no doubt we'll come across similar issues too, but hey they are worth jumping through if we're saving £25 a time for the pleasure.