My family and I will be moving from Madrid to Boston. Can anyone recommend the best way to get the Euros I make on the house and car sale into dollars and into the USA?
Put into a bank account and withdraw from the USA would work for you? Seems simplest, if you have a big enough international bank.
Or simply put it into your Spanish bank - your ATM card will work in the States, so you can withdraw what you need right away when you’re there, saving you extortionate commission fees. Then when you’ve opened up your US bank account, have the Spanish bank close your account and send you a cheque for the balance (the US bank will accept it, even if it’s written in euros).
PS Why would anybody want to leave Madrid 
The best place to find out is the bank. If you already have an account in Boston, ask them. If you don’t then any bank will be happy to help you open an account and get the funds across. There are many American banks in Madrid, including Citibank. I have an account with them in DC and they have a toll free number to call from Spain (900 991 489) to their US customer service. Which is ironic when you think that to call from Madrid a bank in Madrid they have toll numbers. You cannot get any more cheap and tacky than that. So, while I am in Madrid it is cheaper for me to call my bank in Washington than my bank in Madrid.
Careful, lots of little US banks and S&Ls don’t deal with and foreign currency. Of the banks that do deal with foreign currencies, often it isn’t a good deal (i.e. lousy exchange rate and/or high commission).
If it is a lot of money, safest is to wire the funds. It will cost you a little bit, perhaps $10 on each side of the transaction, but there is no paper to get lost, etc. It’s probably a better deal to have the bank in Spain to wire USD (i.e. have the Spanish bank do the conversion), but it doesn’t hurt to ask the US bank if they accept Euros and how much the exchange will cost.
I worked in International Banking for 20 years, and even if a local bank doesn’t deal directly in foreign currencies, they utilize correspondent banks that do.
Exchange rates are not so much of a problem as they used to be since transfers are made overnight in most cases. Therefore, the exchange rate you are quoted will be fairly equivalent to the actual exchange rate.
Here’s how things work:
If you ask the Spanish bank to transfer U.S. Dollars to your U.S. Dollar account, they will debit your Euro account, do the math, deposit the U.S. dollars in their account with a U.S. correspondent bank and request that the funds be remitted to your U.S. Dollar account.
If, on the other hand, you have the Euros transferred, the Spanish bank will debit your account and credit Euros to their account at a correspondent bank and request the transfer. The U.S. bank will do the conversion on this end and credit your account the resultant dollar amount.
Years ago, this could take weeks and could result in big differences in exchange rates; today, as I mentioned above, most transfers are overnight, eliminating most of that risk.
There can be, however, slight differences in exchange rates between Spain and the U.S., depending on how each country values the Euro against the U.S. Dollar. There might be a trend and the worth of investigating that trend can make a big difference when substantial amounts of money are involved.
Interesting - I talked to a number of banks in my area, and most do not handle foreign exchange at all. Some will handle foreign exchange for commercial accounts only. I get grief every time I try to cash a “Canadian” money order denominated in USD and drawn on a US subsidiary of a Canadian bank, even after I track down the manager and point out these things (like the “Wall St” address). My experience is hardly unique, I have friends and relatives in various locations in the US who can describe the same clueless reaction from US banks. I can’t find it now, but one of the banks I dealt with explicitly stated “No Foreign Currencies, no exchange, all transactions in USD” in their customer agreement, which used to be posted on the web.
As for exchange rate, the problem is not that the rate will change, it is the commission plus the spread that they build into the quoted rate. Sometimes this spread can be, well, breathtaking.
I wonder if that’s a Cleveland thing; I never had that experience with US banks. Still, good to know.
I don’t think its just a Cleveland thing. I got similar grief (though perhaps not as bad) when I lived in Minneapolis, and I’ve heard the same from relatives in Dallas and rural Illinois.
If you deal with a national (Citibank, Chase, …) or large regional bank (Northwest, Key, National City, etc) you won’t have this problem. However the smaller banks often have better overall deals and better customer service.
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kind of left that last message hanging. The smaller banks have a lot of things going for them, from a customer’s perspective, but foreign exchange ain’t one of them.