You're joking, but when I did a wire transfer it failed the first time and I had to call my bank and give them extra information over the phone, including the street address of the branch where the destination account lives. Considering how much labor went into it, I understand why they charged me $30.
Many (most?) banks charge an outgoing wire fee. That $30 fee is probably the same whether you’re trying to wire $250 or $250,000, and is probably unrelated to _where_ you’re wiring the money to.
>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire.
This isn't true, each bank sets their own fees. It's true it's usually stupid expensive to send one, but none of my main banks charge to receive a wire.
Wire transfers tend to have a $35-$50 fee and require you to schlep down to the bank during business hours and fill out annoying paperwork. So, yeah, we don't use them except in emergencies.
> when I saw that a transfer (it's called a "wire transfer") will cost me $35 on the sending side, and the receiver will pay another $25.
Wire transfers are different than ACH transfers. Wire transfers cost money and take less than one business day. ACH transfers are inexpensive* and generally take in the ballpark of five business days.
* They are inexpensive for the bank. At banks that treat their customers fairly, they're generally free because the cost accounting is generally more than the cost of performing the transfer. At shitty banks, (BofA, Wells Fargo, etc) they're arbitrarily expensive.
I could not believe my eyes when I saw that a transfer (it's called a "wire transfer") will cost me $35 on the sending side, and the receiver will pay another $25. Then you need the bizarre routing numbers which banks bizarrely obfuscate for even more bizarre reasons and which are easy to get wrong because there is no checksum. And then it takes days.
No wonder when anything even slightly better appears, people jump on it.
For comparison, a SEPA transfer in the EU costs around 1 EUR, gets done within a single business day, and account numbers have checksums, so you can't easily make a mistake.
Wire transfers have borderline predatory fees unless you're moving thousands of dollars, and there's still the issue of "oh you entered one of the numbers incorrectly, hopefully they give you your money back!"
The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located. The mind boggles.
> Has she tried sending a wire outside of US lately?
Costs at most about $35 for any size wire, shows up in a corresponding bank within a day. If the corresponding bank is not the ultimate destination, takes whatever the amount of time it takes for the end transaction to complete. In event of a bank mess up on a transfer, the wire gets rejected/credited back. For banks that do "online" FedWire rather than batched, wires show up and are credited within seconds.
What, exactly, is the problem?
P.S. Non-immediate transfer is a feature and not a bug.
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