Transferring Larger Sums of Money??

I want to transfer a large amount (about $6500) from my US BoA account to my UK account here. I have PayPal accounts, but I'm not confident that PayPal is the best way to deal with larger amounts.

I noticed that I can make out-of-bank transfers from my BoA account, for a fee of course, and it covers banks out of the US. Is that the best way to do it?

Also, are there any tax implications here with HMRC?

Thanks! 

You can use XE.com to transfer money.  There are no fees from XE, and depending on what methods of payment your banks use there may be no bank fees either (my banks don't charge for sending or receiving electronic payments).  The catch is XE's exchange rate is a little worse than the actual rate, and they make money on the difference.  I've used them a bunch of times to move money back and forth, and never had a problem with them.

In the case of moving a lot of money, you'd have to look at how much you'd lose on the XE exchange rate vs how much PayPal or your bank would charge.

In the case of moving a lot of money, you'd have to look at how much you'd lose on the XE exchange rate vs how much PayPal or your bank would charge.

YMMV, but I did two $100 transfers on the same day, one with XE and one with PP. I don't remember what the exact difference was, but I know PP was quite a bit higher (%-wise).

Paypal's rates are likely better than the bank (they are mine), however the one issue I recently came across is that my bank account that is linked to Paypal won't allow instant transfers, so it takes 5 days to do an e-check and then 2 days to transfer from Paypal to my UK bank account. Good news is it only costs £3.50 versus the instant transfer fees.

There are no tax implications so far that I've found on this end, but there is a limit you can send. Something about money laundering. But you are below the $9000 limit.

I'd just do a bit of research to find out which you feel more comfortable about.

Remittances to the UK of relevant foreign income including for example income or gains may give rise to a UK tax liability, which you'd need to calculate and report on the UK tax return.

Back in June, when my OH first moved over to the UK, I sent over £10,000 so he could buy a car and get established. This was about $16,500. I did a wire transfer from our US bank account to his UK account. I never had any problems sending it. However the problem does become that we will have to declare this account on the FBAR form since we had a foreign account that had more than $10k in it at any given time this year.

We have used XE to do other transfers, but now I'm wondering if we are getting the best rates. I'm contemplating Paypal now.

The FBAR is simply a return to the US Treasury. UK tax requires reporting of remittances of income or gains to HMRC. Unless one knows if a specific remitance included relevant foreign income, one can't know what to report to HMRC.