Sending Thai baht to USA, baht to USD options?

[earlinclaifornia]

Suggestions on users preferences

[nigelforbes]

You can't send THB overseas, it must be converted into the receiving destination currency first.

[CharlieH]

MOVED to Bznking 

[timendres]

I use my KPlus mobile app to send money to a US bank.

Exchange rate acceptable, fees acceptable, happy overall.

[flexomike]

Why, you like losing money?

[lkn]

14 hours ago, timendres said:

I use my KPlus mobile app to send money to a US bank.

Exchange rate acceptable, fees acceptable, happy overall.

I just tried to set up a THB → EUR transfer.

 

Unfortunately not all countries nor SWIFT codes are supported, e.g. cannot transfer to Revolut.

 

But can transfer to Wise, so for the transfer, their exchange rate was about 0.1% worse than Google (which is a mid rate, so no-one will give you that) and the fee was 250 baht.

 

Also, the daily limit was “equivalent to 100,000 USD”. That was somewhat surprising, I would have expected less.

 

Lastly, to do the transfer, I had to select that this was funds earned while in Thailand. I am not sure if there are other ways to set up the transfer, cause I would be rather hesitant to transfer large amounts out of Thailand, and declaring it as money earned here, unless it actually was money earned here (because of potential tax implications).

[Lodestone]

I do this every month online. I have my SCB account linked to my US bank and just send away. I get near market rates (e.g. today SCB gives 34.92 THB/USD vs. the market rate of 34.79). And only pay an additional flat fee of of 300 baht.

[racket]

The way I do it is through crypto. Here’s how, open up a bitkub crypto account in thailand and deposit Thai Baht. 
 

You can choose different USD stable coins, but the ones available there are USDC, BUSD, and USDT. 
 

Then, withdraw your stablecoins to a crypto exchange in America or another of your choosing that allows withdrawals to a US bank account. 
 

This saves your a lot of transaction fees and you are not getting ripped off by the exchange rates that Thai banks offer to convert to USD. 

[Sheryl]

What amount fo you want to send at a time? Makes considerable difference im terms of what is most economical.

[earlinclaifornia]

3 hours ago, Sheryl said:

What amount fo you want to send at a time? Makes considerable difference im terms of what is most economical.

My daughter just took me to Singapore and Langkawi for ten days. I want to send 1000 dollars on time

[Sheryl]

3 hours ago, earlinclaifornia said:

My daughter just took me to Singapore and Langkawi for ten days. I want to send 1000 dollars on time

At that amount I'd look into Dee Money or Wise. 

[lkn]

19 hours ago, racket said:

This saves your a lot of transaction fees and you are not getting ripped off by the exchange rates that Thai banks offer to convert to USD. 

Isn’t there a 0.25% trading fee on bitkub? Isn’t many of the THB pairs trading at a slight premium because of Thailand’s currency controls? Also, CoinBase states that “there is a 1% fee to convert and withdraw your crypto to cash in addition to standard network fees”, so if you withdraw via CoinBase (in the U.S.), wouldn’t you then also have to pay this?

[racket]

On 12/14/2022 at 10:02 AM, lkn said:

Isn’t there a 0.25% trading fee on bitkub? Isn’t many of the THB pairs trading at a slight premium because of Thailand’s currency controls? Also, CoinBase states that “there is a 1% fee to convert and withdraw your crypto to cash in addition to standard network fees”, so if you withdraw via CoinBase (in the U.S.), wouldn’t you then also have to pay this?

There is always going to be fees associated with transfers or exchange.    
 

So 0.25% is $2.5 out of your $1000. That’s pretty cheap compared to the lower exchange rates and fees on several Banks. 
 

I used to pay over $100 in bank transfer fees, but no longer.

 

CoinBase is one of the most expensive crypto exchanges. Consider another regulated exchange such as Kraken. 

I normally deposit $1000 into Kraken, convert to USDC. Then transfer it to a USDC wallet on Bitkub, which takes less than 5 minutes. (Small fee applied here).

 

Then I convert that USDC to Thai Baht and transfer that money into my Thai Bank account. 
 

All this for less than $5-$8.

Make sure you sell your $ on Kraken and set a limit order to 1 for USDC or USDT, you’ll save on fees for setting limit orders as well. 
 

 

[lkn]

10 minutes ago, racket said:

All this for less than $5-$8.

But this is for sending money to Thailand, right (you said you deposited $1,000 on Kraken, converted to USDC and sent to Bitkub)? Because here I would actually have expected you could make a profit from people wanting to buy crypto coins with THB (and thus benefit from the small premium caused by Thailand’s currency controls).

 

The OP wants to get money out of Thailand.

 

For the records, Google currently reports that $1,000 = ฿34,890.

 

If I send ฿34,890 with DeeMoney then the recipient will get $998, so a $2 fee.

[racket]

5 hours ago, lkn said:

But this is for sending money to Thailand, right (you said you deposited $1,000 on Kraken, converted to USDC and sent to Bitkub)? Because here I would actually have expected you could make a profit from people wanting to buy crypto coins with THB (and thus benefit from the small premium caused by Thailand’s currency controls).

 

The OP wants to get money out of Thailand.

 

For the records, Google currently reports that $1,000 = ฿34,890.

 

If I send ฿34,890 with DeeMoney then the recipient will get $998, so a $2 fee.

You need to check exchange rate over at DeeMoney. But yeah this works vice versa as well. 

[lkn]

1 hour ago, racket said:

You need to check exchange rate over at DeeMoney. But yeah this works vice versa as well. 

That is what I did, and now I also checked Kraken + Bitkub:

 

If I go by the stated fees, I get 0.20% on Kraken to buy USDC, 0.25% on Bitkub to sell USDC, and then 20 THB to withdraw from Bitkub (I assume depositing to Kraken is free, this will depend on your bank), and probably around $0.50 to transfer USDC on the Ethereum blockchain (but maybe you use a cheaper chain?)

 

This all comes out to about $5.50, but if I then actually look at how many THB I get from selling USDC on Bitkub, it currently gives me 34.85 THB for each USDC where Wise will give me 35.06 THB for 1 USD.

 

So with your method, I end up with around 34,658 THB (for sending $1,000), but Wise will give me 34,726 THB (this is sending $1,000 from U.S. bank account via ACH and deposit into Thai bank account).

 

Sure, it’s only 68 baht more received with Wise, but it’s a lot easier and with your method, there are some unknowns, like the gas fee, and how liquid USDC is when you want to sell for THB.

 

All in all, it does not appear that the crypto method has advantages over something like Wise.

 

Though I must confess it is actually impressive that the crypto method, although not cheaper, is at least competitive with Wise, as the crypto method involves at least 3 parties that wants to get paid for their service (Kraken, Bitkub, and the miners).

Edited December 15, 2022 by lkn

[racket]

5 hours ago, lkn said:

That is what I did, and now I also checked Kraken + Bitkub:

 

If I go by the stated fees, I get 0.20% on Kraken to buy USDC, 0.25% on Bitkub to sell USDC, and then 20 THB to withdraw from Bitkub (I assume depositing to Kraken is free, this will depend on your bank), and probably around $0.50 to transfer USDC on the Ethereum blockchain (but maybe you use a cheaper chain?)

 

This all comes out to about $5.50, but if I then actually look at how many THB I get from selling USDC on Bitkub, it currently gives me 34.85 THB for each USDC where Wise will give me 35.06 THB for 1 USD.

 

So with your method, I end up with around 34,658 THB (for sending $1,000), but Wise will give me 34,726 THB (this is sending $1,000 from U.S. bank account via ACH and deposit into Thai bank account).

 

Sure, it’s only 68 baht more received with Wise, but it’s a lot easier and with your method, there are some unknowns, like the gas fee, and how liquid USDC is when you want to sell for THB.

 

All in all, it does not appear that the crypto method has advantages over something like Wise.

 

Though I must confess it is actually impressive that the crypto method, although not cheaper, is at least competitive with Wise, as the crypto method involves at least 3 parties that wants to get paid for their service (Kraken, Bitkub, and the miners).

The miners took only $0.8 last time I transferred around $3000 using the Tron (TRX) network. As of this writing, the USDTHB rate stands at 35.018.

 

$1 USDCTHB gives me 34.97 on Bitkub.

 

But anyways, that’s the way I do it and if you feel Wise works out better, I hope that you now know of an alternative method ????

 

if you are patient you can set limit orders, there are times when it goes above 1:1. 
 

Good luck!

Edited December 15, 2022 by racket

[earlinclaifornia]

Thanks everybody for the valuable suggestions. I had set up Wise before posting and was declined as my Bangkok Bank cc transaction was limited to 5000B Easy online change