Blog Inforeseau.com – Alexandre Blanc Cyber Security

Banking, France – Canada transfer, my solutions

This one is not really related to IT and security, but I wanted to share about how I found solutions for my banking challenges.

Lately, I did read a lot about retirement, financial planning, financial freedom etc, and I learned that traditional banks are not our best friends when it comes to finance. Either personal or business accounts, banks cost you money, while they should give you money !

---

So my first discovery and move this year, was to move to Wealthsimple, and it has been an amazing experience. If you open an account using the link here, or using that code : WGNWUH , you’ll get $25 bonus, and I’ll get it too, assuming you open an account and put CAD $100 on it.

---

What’s amazing with this platform is that your money, by default, works for you !! When you open a bank account in a traditional bank, they charge you, non stop ! Could be $6 a month, or they charge you for operations and more !

Well, moving to Wealthsimple, you get money even when you do nothing, along as you have money in your account. And they have tons of advantages, including free transactions on tons of thing, stock investing and more, no limit, your money is your money, and that’s a relief.

The more money you have in your accounts, as a household, so are eligible anyone living with you, same address, combine their value, and you reach milestones that give you some great perks ! I enjoy the airports lodges so much, with buffet and all, thanks to them ! And on top of this, your milestone rewards are renewed every year, as long as you keep the value in your account.

---

Now that you hold your money in an account that works for you, and are able to invest without transaction fees, you may have some money in France, or receive money from France. One of the constraint with Wealthsimple, is that they won’t accept foreign currencies, aside of CAD and USD.

So either you need to send money from France in CAD, but this is usually costly at your bank, with fees and not the best exchange rate. This is where I found « WISE », this platform allows you to open an account, which will handle multiple currencies, with banks transfer in the support of the currency. If you open an account with this link, or clicking on the picture below, you also get CAD $25 and me too : https://wise.com/invite/dic/alexandreb5263

When you open the account, pick your local currency, and select your country of residence, prove your identity, as always with financing solution, and then, in the same account, you go in account details, and add currencies.

This will add supported currencies, and provide you with bank account information in a country where the currency is in use.

In my case, first one is CAD, second one is EUR.

From there, you can send money for free with a wire transfer from your French traditional bank, using IBAN, and it will land in your Wise account.

Then, you convert the amount in the other currency, they’ll apply the exchange rate of the day, with a small margin, smaller than traditional banks would do.

From there, you can get your money in your local CAD account. But wait, if your try to send a wire transfer, or an interac, you’ll be charged a fee, and we don’t like fees !

EDIT – NO NO NO – Don’t use the direct debit crap on wealthsimple to pull money from Wise !! WISE WILL SCREW YOU

This is where WealthSimple comes to play again !! WealthSimple is partner with Wise, so as you know. Yet, you can just link the bank account in WealthSimple, as you’d do with any other bank account, and withdraw the amount you want from Wise to your WealthSimple account for absolutely no fee !!

EDIT CONTINUED : Use Interact instead, WISE did reverse the direct debit, without any fucking reason, this did lead to my wealhsimple account to be fully blocked, credit card blocked because of this moronic move.

WealthSimple seems to do their job as basically Wise said ok, and then cancelled and pulled the money back ! I’m furious !

Interac seems to be free as well from Wise, but I’m still waiting on them to actually do it, while my account at WS is blocked temporarily (nopefully).

More about this crap here too : https://www.reddit.com/r/Wealthsimple/comments/1ss39fv/eft_wise_wealthsimple_is_being_reversed/

That’s my cheapest way so far to transfer money between Europe and Canada, fairly quickly at low cost.

Again, I hope this will help some of you !