Advice on getting paid in US dollars?

Hi there,
    I have begun work for an NGO that is incorporated in the US. I am a US citizen and will be living in London. The payroll provider for my employer can't direct deposit to UK banks. So, I'm trying to figure out the path of least resistance to getting my dollars-based paycheck into pounds in a UK bank, and would like some advice. What I am trying to avoid here is the time and expense of having to set up a wire transfer and currency conversion every couple of weeks.

Route A: Find a payroll provider that can do UK direct deposit
Does anyone here get paid in dollars but have it direct deposited into a UK account in pounds? I imagine there must be companies that do this. If so, can you provide any details about what payroll company it's done through, what kind of fees you pay (for conversion), etc?

Route B: Open a US account that allows cheap/easy wire transfers
The second option is to find a US bank that will let me set up a standing wire transfer to my UK account (once a month, say). Does anyone have advice about banks/account types that make this easy or cheap? Even better would be if I could specify the standing wire transfer setup in pounds instead of dollars, so that the bank just sends the right amount of dollars to put X amount of pounds in the UK account, going by whatever the exchange rate is at that time. If that's not possible, I'd just specify in dollars, and get however many pounds it comes out to. But of course I'd like to have some kind of predictability in my budget.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

Ugh, that's not good. Would they be willing to wire the money to your UK account and pay for the associated fees? Because you're going to lose a lot of money in fees.

Well, when the founder of the company spoke with me, we agreed it would be in pounds. He just didn't know they couldn't do it. So if I can demonstrate that there's no way around me paying huge fees, I'll take that back to him and I think he'll bump up my salary to compensate.  Or they'll let me expense it or something.

Regardless, I need to learn the ins-and-outs of how people do this, so I get screwed the least amount possible. ;-)

-- Chris

Do you belong to a credit union in the US? Mine didn't charge me for wiring money.

Due to money laundering issues, I would be really surprised if you could find a payroll provider that will directly deposit US dollars into a UK account.

Or, can you use your US ATM card to withdraw cash from the UK cash machines? Contact your bank and find out what types of fees they charge on international transactions. Again, I'm not sure my credit union charged me when using ATMs.

Can you tell I love my credit union!?  

With an account at Bank of America, you can withdraw from Barclays ATMs for free and you can do international transfers directly from the online banking console. It's pretty easy.

Presumably your employer willl operate PAYE so why not let your employer's choice of payroll company deal with the payments to your UK bank as well as figuring out how much to withhold?

We opened an account with HSBC in the US, then one in the UK.  DH's employer is in the US and deposits his check in dollars, then we use the global banking option to move money from the US account to the UK one.