Money transfer - USA to Canada

Transferring money from institutions in USA to financial institutions in Canada is one of the things, for which there are not many pointers online or otherwise. There are several scenarios when you would want know more about this one.

For what scenarios would you want to know about this?

• If you are immigrating from USA to Canada and want to move your assets permanently.
• If your company offers some stock plans that are managed by financial institutions like Fidelity Investments. You can encash the stocks and want to get the proceeds in your Canadian account.

Recapping some basics 

• You can create a bank account in Canada that holds the USD currency.
• You can transfer USD into this account and can convert to CAD if you want to.

Depositing cash

You can deposit US dollar bills in a traditional bank like Scotiabank that has retail branches. That's where some of the online banking services cannot help! The tellers can advise and help you.

• If you open up a USD account in your Canadian bank then you can deposit it directly. You don't lose money at all in this case. 
• You can also convert the bills to Canadian dollars and deposit it in your account. Note that you don't get the best exchange rate in banks. If you don't plan on creating a USD account then you could can also get Canadian foreign exchange in USA.

So if you don't need the money immediately then you might want to keep it in the USD account in your Canadian bank. At a later date, you can convert it if you want to.

Wire transfer

You can initiate a wire transfer from your Canadian bank like Scotiabank. This is where some of the online banks like Tangerine cannot help.

• There will be wire transfer charges per transfer. So depending upon the banks in question, plan on doing a one-shot transfer. 
• Please try a small amount like 100 USD first before trying out the entire amount. 
• Some of the wire transfer systems are faulty. (Read out experience below) 
• It might convert USD to CAD and back. So that double conversion means that you would lose money.
• While you get the amount instantly there is a risk of losing money if systems are faulty. Decide accordingly.

Depositing the check

Since you can open up a USD account in your Canadian bank then this is a very viable option. You can deposit say your Bank of America check in your Scotiabank USD account. For amounts more than 10K USD, usually the bank would put an hold for the amount for around 20-30 days. This means that the amount is unavailable for those many days. But the good thing is that there is no risk of conversion or losing money!!!

What was our experience?

Given that we were in the US for a little over a decade, we had a lot of savings. When we were in the US, we couldn't find information on how to go about this. We reached out to our Bank of America branch and they told us we could wire transfer the money. We also called up the customer service of  several Canadian banks to check our options. We didn't get many definitive answers. Considering that we were planning to get visitor's visa to the US in case we couldn't move money online!

We didn't have Canadian dollars and so we took around 10K USD in cash. We were planning to transfer the remaining via wire transfer. When we landed in Canada, the bank told us that we could also open up a USD account. But remember that the credit cards and debit cards are associated with Canadian dollar currency and not USD. So we chose to just deposit 5K USD in the account and converted the remaining 5K USD into CAD.

As for the other money, we initially tried a wire transfer of 100 USD from our Bank of America account to Scotiabank's USD account. We were charged 45 USD by Bank of America and we were hoping that 100 USD showed up in Scotiabank. But what happened was unexpected! 100 USD showed up in Scotiabank as 83 USD! When Scotiabank troubleshooted this problem, it seemed like their system had a glitch and converted USD to CAD and then back to USD. This double conversion caused us to lose 17 USD. We had Scotiabank reimburse this money but the lesson to be learnt from this is that if you plan to wire a huge amount, try it out with a small amount first before you do the whole thing.

Now, you might have a different experience with other institutions but beware of the charges and currency conversions that might occur. What we landed up doing is depositing a Bank of America check for the remaining amount to Scotiabank's USD account. The amount is kept on hold for around 30 days for amounts over 10K USD. We didn't need the amount immediately and so we were good. We didn't lose money and so it was worth it!

Note that you can also transfer your investments like stocks and ETFs from your US financial investment firm to a Canadian investment firm. More in an another post. Hope that knowing this eases your fears about transferring assets from USA to Canada.

Disclaimer - We are only stating our experience and recommending based on the research we did. We are not financial advisors and are not marketing for any financial firm.