Offer Accepted...Pay Your Deposit

The day after I made my offer, I heard the happy news that it had been accepted. Hooray! What was then required of me was to pay a deposit of $1,000 immediately, which would be held in an escrow account (i.e. in an account held by a neutral third party - in order words, not held be either the buyer or the seller). In my case, the $1,000 would be held by my solicitor, so I need to pay this amount into her firm's account.

Top Tip: Escrow is a term that confuses me slightly - mainly because it's not one that's often used in the UK. Read up a little more about it on the Internet: Escrow from Wikipedia.

Now, this is where I came across a somewhat tricky situation. I need to transfer $1,000 from my account to a U.S. account FAST. I had no idea or experience of how to do this, so set about doing a little bit of research. Here's what I came up with - in a short space of time!

Existing Bank I thought I'd ask my own bank, HSBC, if they could help with this. I popped into my local branch and also called up my telephone banking service. They said they certainly could help...but that such transfers could take up to six days. Although sometimes funds are transferred faster, they couldn't give my any guarantee on how many days it'd take, apart from the six-day limit. I didn't have six days! My closing date was nine days away!

Conclusion: Too slow!

Large Foreign Exchange Company There's many of these companies out there, such as MoneyCorp, a company that had been recommend to me before. I had, in fact, intended to use them later to transfer the purchase price amount. Although they do transfers very quickly, quite a few of them have a minimum amount that you need to transfer. $1,000, in this case, was too low.

It may well be possible that, seeing as I was going to transfer a FAR larger amount in a week or so, they would have agreed to my $1,000 transfer. What put me off was that I would have had to set up an account with MoneyCorp to do any type of foreign exchange - and I didn't know how long this would take, or what the process would entail. I was slightly panicky given the lack of time I had, and so didn't investigate this option.

Conclusion: Won't accept "small" amounts!

Smaller Foreign Exchange Company I was getting somewhat frustrated by this point. I couldn't believe that it was seemingly so difficult to transfer $1,000 quickly to a U.S. account. So, I delved deeper to find a smaller foreign exchange company. My problem here was I'd never heard of many of them before, so had no idea who to go for. I was, after all, transferring over quite a bit of money! It seemed I'd have to take the plunge and trust one of them. However, these companies WILL transfer small amounts, and will do so FAST.

Conclusion: Fits the bill - but need to find a "trusted" one

So, as you may have guessed, I ending up going for the third option. I used a company called OnlineFx. They were able to transfer my $1,000 by a guaranteed two working days, for a fee of £15. At the time (December 2007), the total cost to me was £524.17 (including the fee).

Top Tip: Make sure you give the details of the receiving bank very carefully. U.S. bank accounts have an account number (of course) and a routing number (instead of a sort code). You'll also need the bank name, address, and account name. If any of these details are incorrectly given to your exchange company, the transfer may get delayed.