At first my plan was to open an actual account in the US, to transfer from. Opening an US account is a supreme pain in the ass though. It didn’t work out. Didn’t help that the guy at the friggin bank didn’t know what he was doing (what else is new), but I just ended up giving up because it was quite clearly going to be a pain.

I ended up opening a borderless chequings account at TD. It’s denominated in USD, and it’s fairly easy to wire into. You’ll need to know the swift code, and sometimes the whole branch, transit number (which they don’t have)/account number thing can sometimes trip the Americans up, especially if they don’t wire Canada that often, or deal with smaller regional banks. If that is causing issues for them at their facilities, what you can do is add an extra 0 to the financial institution code, and just have them combine them in the account number for the wire. For example 00010123411112222, with 0001 being the bank in this example, 01234 being the transit number in this example and 11112222 in this example being your account number.

Remember too, that a wire is going to hit you with $17-20 in fees every time, so find out what your fees will be for incoming wires, and negotiate that into your contract that they’ll cover that.

For conversion, definitely don’t use the bank unless you need that money this very instant. I used to use Knightsbridge, but they are slower than molasses (especially when it seems the trade is not in their favour), and you sometimes have to talk to people that are rushed and who don’t listen very good. I found that led to mistakes that you have to scramble to cover and fix when you got the confirmations, and one time I didn’t catch it and they almost overdrew my account.

Instead, I’ve been using Remitbee. It’s been giving me good conversion rates (often 40-50 basis points from midrate, which is comparable to what Knightsbridge takes, and is nowhere near comparable to the bank, who will take 250 basis points). It’s also pretty quick (usually 2-3 business days) and they just draw it out of the borderless account as an etf and put it back to my CAD chequings account. Being that it’s all online through their platform, you don’t need to trade with any humans, which mitigates the translation mistakes, and best of all it keeps the records of your trades, that will help you at tax time. So far l’ve been pretty happy with using them.

Also, just in case you aren’t aware, make sure you fill out a W-8BEN form and submit it to them. That way they don’t have to withhold tax.