Moving your savings from the US to the UK

Hi,

Not sure the best place to ask this so I'll try here as it is more or less 'Moving' related..

We will be arriving in the UK October 1st.. we will keep our Checking account with Bank of American open but we are starting to wonder how we are going to eventually get all of our money moved over to the UK.

Bank of America has a 'Global Alliance' with Barclays.. meaning that I will not be charged ATM fees if I withdraw money in the UK from one of their ATM machines however I will be charged like 2% for them converting the currency from dollars to pounds.

From reading thru other posts it seems it may be hard to get a bank quickly and I am just wondering how everybody got their savings moved from their US bank to the UK for use without loosing a ton of money in fees and transaction charges.  Also... we have a debit card that can be used (Visa Logo) but the fee for them converting from pounds/dollars is even higher than 2% for that!   

Do you need to move all of your savings to the UK?

I use my UK salary to pay for my UK expenses. I rarely use the money in my US bank account, for example, if I use a US credit card online I will pay for it from a US bank. But otherwise, the money in the US bank basically just sits there.

There is a thread in the money section about this.  We have heard good reports from Worldwide Currencies (link from my site http://www.medivisas.com/links.asp )


Vicky