What's a good method of sending money overseas?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My SO bought something on Ebay from germany. She didn’t realize the buyer would not take Paypal payment until after she won the auction so now we have to find some way of getting $70 to the seller. The seller has a lot of good feedback, but he would prefer cash. I’m a little worried over sending cash overseas, would it be easy for him to cash a personal check form the US in Germany? Could I purchase a German money order from here some how? Is it safge to send cash through the mail system?

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

2

You could always wire the money to the person in Germany. Western Union charges you 6% of the total amount you want to send. So your SO would pay an extra $4.20 to make sure the cash reaches the seller. That might be worth it to him or her.

If you have an account with a large, international bank that has branches in Germany, and the seller has an account with that same bank, you might be able to do an electronic funds transfer. It might be worth opening an account just to do this. You can always close it right after you’re done making the transfer.

3

I’d second Western Union; it’s probably the simplest and most convenient. I used it pretty extensively when I lived in Prague.

4

You can’t send “cash” as in “pieces of paper printed by the US Mint”… or at least, you shouldn’t!

Western Union, thirded.

5

I cannot comment on Western Union, never having used them.

The common payment method for bills in Germany is transfer between bank accounts - between domestic accounts that’s very cheap, but your bank probably will take a substantial fee for a transfer to a German account. Perhaps you could ask your bank. NB the German recipient won’t mind you asking for his bank account information as it’s considered quasi-public information - businesses have their bank information on their letterhead paper.

It is possible to credit a check drawn on a US bank to a German bank account (I get payments from Amazon that way), but the recipient of the check will incur bank fees of about 10-15 EUR which you’d need to add to the sum (again, the fee for domestic checks is cheap but the coding of US checks is incompatible so there’s manual processing involved), also the recipient possibly would want to wait some time in case the check bounces.

So, if the Western Union fee is really that modest as stated in this thread it may well be the most economical method.