Converting money?

We're moving over to England in November but are unsure of how to take our money with us.  We'll have about $17,000.  What's the best way to go about it?  We use Bank of America, and I've heard that they have a relationship with a UK bank.  Is there a way to just transfer/convert the money within the two banks without incurring any fees?  We don't want to do PayPal because of their fees (and not to mention that they can really screw you over if they decide to freeze your account).  Help?

http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=45618.0

http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=44773.0

As I have said before, firms like Worldwide can save you quite a lot of money.

Vicky

We had around $16,000 in savings when we arrived.
We use Bank of America, and you can withdraw money from Barclays without any fees (they are the bank with the "special" relationship). We also have a Capital One Visa, which doesn't charge any fees either.

We decided to leave our money in our US savings account, and just using the Capital One to buy most things. We then pay it off with our savings. Since the exchange rate is so bad, I didn't find much point in moving ALL of our money over, so this way we are only moving over money as we need it.

We had around $16,000 in savings when we arrived.
We use Bank of America, and you can withdraw money from Barclays without any fees (they are the bank with the "special" relationship). We also have a Capital One Visa, which doesn't charge any fees either.

We decided to leave our money in our US savings account, and just using the Capital One to buy most things. We then pay it off with our savings. Since the exchange rate is so bad, I didn't find much point in moving ALL of our money over, so this way we are only moving over money as we need it.

Thanks for your suggestions here. I spent some time on the intarwebz and found this great site (http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Credit/Debit/ATM_Cards_and_Foreign_Exchange), which basically confirms that what you did was fiscally a great choice (it has fee information on most major banks, from the perspective of spending abroad). I ended up also opening a CapitalOne credit account (they just have MC now, it seems, which is a bit unfortunate) and a BofA MyAccess checking account. I probably won't use them as my main accounts, but they seem to be great for dealing with foreign transactions and pulling money out from time to time.

Cheers,
Aaron

That is strange that they only do Mastercards now. I was pretty annoyed that they only gave me a limit of $3000. I didn't realize, but I actually had an account with a limit of around $8000 already. I had never used it, and only found out after checking my credit report and canceling the card. They won't let me extend my credit yet, either!

1500 GBP just doesn't go very far.

Barclays does have a foreign currency account as well, where you can keep your USD.