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Best ways to withdraw cash?

traveller79

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Jan 23, 2018
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Sorry if this is the wrong place, but here it goes:

What would be the best (and cheapest) way to withdraw cash? Let say, from Sepa enabled EU based bank/EMI?

Debit cards often have about 2% fee for ATM withdrawals, which is already quite much if you need, let say 5000 euros (whopping 100 euros in that case).

Recently, I tried Azimo while travelling in Belarus. I sent some EUR to myself on their site and chose cash pickup from local bank in EUR. Please note, I sent EUR and picked up EUR. This is not always available as money transfer services want to earn from hidden currency exchange fees by offering a bad rate. I paid for the transfer with Transferwise Debit card.

Absolutely no fee at all! I got every single euro what was debited from Transferwise account to my hand. Process was relatively easy and quick. Regular fee for such transfer was something like 2.99 EUR, but they had introductionary offer for new users, 2 free tranfers.

With - let say, 1000 EUR, that fee would make just 0,299% so much less than the ATM fee. Problem here is that probably you can't send very big amounts, let say over 2000 or 5000 EUR (due to debit card transaction size limits), but you can always make few different transfers while visiting different countries, should be safer too.

Second option I have considered is Eurex money exchange in Estonia - they have cash pickup service that works with Sepa transfer. I once had a talk at their "branch" and they said I should just email/call them and book some amount. As soon as the transfer is visible, they will give the cash out in EUR. I imagine this would work well for bigger amounts, like 10000 or 50000 EUR, but I haven't tried that.

Their fee is 0,3%, min 5€, so for example taking out 10000 eur would cost 15 eur. Pretty reasonable, I guess. I haven't tried it, but I am curious.

Obviously, I am not suggesting travelling to some country just for the cash, but if you have travelling life style anyway, taking care of cash needs while having it is just practical.

I guess there are a lot of people who have the opposite problem, they have cash they would like to get deposited to a bank. Cheapest way of course would be to co-operate with such party, but maybe bit risky and difficult to find.

Oh, totally forgot. Lithuanian based Paysera has some interesting options in Lithuania. First of all, they offer 0,45% fee at their own office for business customers, but also 0,5e flat fee at Narvesen kiosks (all over Lithuana) for amounts up to 500 eur. That is just 0,1% in that case!
 
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TLDR. You only needed to post the first 3 lines. It is better to get some responses than none because you rambled on for too long :(.
 
You may have you reason to withdraw cash in the ATM's around, so you may simply pay what the costs are and forget about the surcharges that apply. If it is all legit money and you need to buy something you can use a credit card or make a bank transfer which most often is much cheaper.
 
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Have you checked Money transfers TavexWise - Tavex Latvia ?
I like way how Tavex provide service, they are in 7 countries and customer service is very professional, I sometimes use their services, but it is gold related and I have only good experience with them.

With Eurex I had couple small currency exchange transactions and one quite different. In my opinion they are shady! Sometimes it is good, sometimes not so good. I don't want to tell country where it happened, but I had X00 000 PLN in cash, not in Poland. I needed exchange to EUR cash, I went straight in their service center and said to women sitting there what I need and explained that I need it without questions and reporting to anywhere. She gave me some guys phone number(or maybe I gave my phone number to her, can't remember exactly), we contacted and he told me that he can exchange only 200 000 PLN, which at that moment was about 45k EUR, it was little less what I needed, but still good. Later that day we met at the same branch and done exchange without any paperwork, they even didn't ask for my passport. It was about 8 years ago. And yes, they gave me good exchange rate also.
 
Yes, I know Tavex, originally from Estonia. I believe their offer is similar to Eurex which I mentioned in my original post, but there are no details on the website.

Sure, using credit/debit card is an option, but so far, the best offers I have seen are somewhere around 5000 EUR per month without fees and 1-2% after this. I understand that some people think that 1-2% is cheap, but again - the whole point of this thread is to find cheaper ways, something like 0,1 - 0,2%. And with legal money - it should be possible.

I am now evaluating two Polish banks who promise unlimited free ATM withdrawals in different currencies - let see what happens.
 
Sorry if this is the wrong place, but here it goes:

What would be the best (and cheapest) way to withdraw cash? Let say, from Sepa enabled EU based bank/EMI?

Debit cards often have about 2% fee for ATM withdrawals, which is already quite much if you need, let say 5000 euros (whopping 100 euros in that case).

Recently, I tried Azimo while travelling in Belarus. I sent some EUR to myself on their site and chose cash pickup from local bank in EUR. Please note, I sent EUR and picked up EUR. This is not always available as money transfer services want to earn from hidden currency exchange fees by offering a bad rate. I paid for the transfer with Transferwise Debit card.

Absolutely no fee at all! I got every single euro what was debited from Transferwise account to my hand. Process was relatively easy and quick. Regular fee for such transfer was something like 2.99 EUR, but they had introductionary offer for new users, 2 free tranfers.

With - let say, 1000 EUR, that fee would make just 0,299% so much less than the ATM fee. Problem here is that probably you can't send very big amounts, let say over 2000 or 5000 EUR (due to debit card transaction size limits), but you can always make few different transfers while visiting different countries, should be safer too.

Second option I have considered is Eurex money exchange in Estonia - they have cash pickup service that works with Sepa transfer. I once had a talk at their "branch" and they said I should just email/call them and book some amount. As soon as the transfer is visible, they will give the cash out in EUR. I imagine this would work well for bigger amounts, like 10000 or 50000 EUR, but I haven't tried that.

Their fee is 0,3%, min 5€, so for example taking out 10000 eur would cost 15 eur. Pretty reasonable, I guess. I haven't tried it, but I am curious.

Obviously, I am not suggesting travelling to some country just for the cash, but if you have travelling life style anyway, taking care of cash needs while having it is just practical.

I guess there are a lot of people who have the opposite problem, they have cash they would like to get deposited to a bank. Cheapest way of course would be to co-operate with such party, but maybe bit risky and difficult to find.

Oh, totally forgot. Lithuanian based Paysera has some interesting options in Lithuania. First of all, they offer 0,45% fee at their own office for business customers, but also 0,5e flat fee at Narvesen kiosks (all over Lithuana) for amounts up to 500 eur. That is just 0,1% in that case!
One do not need a lot of cash during traveling to faraway places. Just enough for one pocket and some at hand in case of an emergency. However, I fail to understand why you cannot just make do with a card as it is much cheaper and make one unattractive to criminal elements. However, thank you for your topic which was interesting to read. Cheers!
 
Yes, I know Tavex, originally from Estonia. I believe their offer is similar to Eurex which I mentioned in my original post, but there are no details on the website.

Sure, using credit/debit card is an option, but so far, the best offers I have seen are somewhere around 5000 EUR per month without fees and 1-2% after this. I understand that some people think that 1-2% is cheap, but again - the whole point of this thread is to find cheaper ways, something like 0,1 - 0,2%. And with legal money - it should be possible.

I am now evaluating two Polish banks who promise unlimited free ATM withdrawals in different currencies - let see what happens.
Crypterium charges a small fee equal to 0.5% so maybe this is exact what you need, check it out Crypterium — Cryptobank for Cryptopeople
 

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