Hello Everybody.
I am closing my bank account with Erste in Austria. The bank will wire transfer the balance to my account in Taiwan.
I’ve try to ask how much the fee would be for a transfer from Erest to a bank in Taiwan. They either don’t understand me or they don’t know the answer.
It’s free to close an account and there maybe intermediate bank fee in between but if anyone has experience transferring fund out of Austria, please let me know the figure. I’ll just take out cash from an ATM here in Taiwan instead of having Erste to transfer it if it’s too expensive.
Thank’s a lot!
What usually seems to happen is that both banks insist they’ll only impose their own charge but can’t possibly find out if the other bank uses an intermediary, and when you notice the charge was higher than the two quoted fees combined, each bank blames the other one. :fume: :fume: :fume:
Oh sorry, I was going to comment on the price of tea in China…
The international outgoing transfer fee should be listed in Erste’s fee schedule, which in turn should be linked from the front page on their website. Have you checked there? Even if the staff told me what it were, I’d still confirm it myself to avoid surprises.
On the other end, an incoming transfer fee in Taiwan is typically in the order of 300 TWD. There might be some exceptions: HSBC used to have free incoming transfers, not sure about it now. Plus, as yyy stated before, there is the possibility of being assessed intermediary fees as well, and they are a big unknown.
In terms of fees, an ATM withdrawal will almost always be cheaper. The advantage of doing a transfer is that you have some control over the exchange rate, and you should be able to get a better than from an ATM, which matters especially for larger amounts money. Just to confirm, for that to work you should obviously be doing a transfer to your foreign currency account in Taiwan, same as the one in Austria (most likely Euro).
There is also the possibility that an incoming transfer might become taxable income, whereas if you just withdraw money with an overseas ATM card, there is no way it could be taxed unless you report it yourself.
A withdrawal is instantaneous but a transfer will take a couple of days to clear and can bounce back for some minuscule reason such as a typo in the account bearer’s name, and for this even larger fees are assessed. I don’t know what the closing balance of your account is but roughly, below 30,000 TWD I definitely wouldn’t bother with a transfer; above 100,000 TWD I’d give it some consideration; in between those amounts, I would need to know more about the fees to decide.
If you choose to do the transfer, opt to share the costs with the recipient (SHA). The other options (BEN, OUR) might attract even higher bank fees.
Let us know later how it went through.
There’s a bank fee on each end plus a network fee. I think the total charge is around 60 EUR.