# Cheapest way to transfer USD to US brokerage?



## vaneyckt (28 Jan 2018)

Hey all. I have a bit of a weird situation.

As part of my job compensation I receive US shares into a Morgan-Stanley account. I want to sell these shares for USD and transfer this money to Firstrade. However, this is proving to be a bit harder than expected.a

My first thought was just to have Morgan-Stanley wire my gains directly to Firstrade. They're both in the US, so how hard could it be? Well, it turns out that Morgan-Stanley does not allow customers to add custom info to the "For Final Credit To" wire transfer field. This means I cannot transfer directly from Morgan-Stanley to Firstrade.

So now I'm looking for alternatives. I figured I might be able to use CurrencyFair as a go-between, but alas US brokers do not accept wire transfers from "3rd party companies". Seems protectionist bs to me, but it is what it is.

It seems the only option left to me is to open a USD account in Ireland and have Morgan-Stanley wire the proceeds to this account. Then I can wire the USD from this account to Firstrade. While this would work, I'm annoyed about the wire fees.

Is there a smarter way to go about this? And more generally, how do people tend to go about transferring funds to their US brokerages? What's the most cost effective way?


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## ronivek (23 Feb 2018)

Bumping this: I'm in a similar boat and wondering how to go about this.

Anyone?


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## Hiragii (23 Feb 2018)

A few days ago I did the same, but from eTrade to Ameritrade, and it worked OK (the USD appeared in Ameritrade shortly after eTrade reported the wire transfer as completed).

However, eTrade allows for additional fields, where I added my FBO (for the benefit of) number, as provided by Ameritrade.

Still cost me $25 for the wire transfer though, but at least I was able to save in currency conversion fees (twice), currency fluctuations, and other charges related to sending back the wire from Ireland to US.


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## flmayo (5 Mar 2018)

I use Transferwise to send money from my U.S bank account to my Irish bank account. It's the cheapest option I have found do far.


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## MugsGame (10 Jun 2019)

I'm looking into this for the same reason. I haven't tried it yet but Revolut now offer incoming USD transfers to your personal IBAN, so there's no need to quote a beneficiary reference field on the broker end. I've successfully set up my Revolut account as a payee on Morgan Stanley, now just need to wait for vesting before testing 

This discussion also suggests it works: https://www.reddit.com/r/Revolut/co...lut/ei9osvu?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x


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## Decision Tree (11 Jun 2019)

I added my Revolut a/c to eTrade, and transferred USD from eTrade to Revolut.  Looks good.


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