It turns out that it is very difficult to do something useful in Romania with US Dollars and below I’d like to share my experience on this matter.
A while ago I worked at a company which offered RSU(Restricted Stock Units) as a form of employee benefits. After a certain period of time, the stock was transferred to me, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. I decided to sell the it, because the company stock appreciated quite a lot and I wasn’t sure the price will would remain like that for a long time. I ended up with a bunch of US Dollars in my US broker account and I somehow had to figure out how to get them in Romania, the country where I lived, so I could actually benefit from them.
The US broker offered two options to transfer the money to a bank. I could either transfer them to an USD account with no additional fee, or convert the USD to a certain currency, for a rather high fee. I didn’t want to pay a fee for converting them either to EUR or RON(Romanian currency) which were the only two currencies in which I had accounts in my own country, but I didn’t had an USD account either.
After asking several banks in Romania if they offered an account in USD, it turned out I didn’t had that many options. I found a bank which offered an account in USD but it had a monthly maintenance fees, and the conversion from USD to RON was very bad. As you probably already figured out, I hate paying fees so at that time, my options were not looking so good.
In the end I chose to risk it and go with Revolut which offered a free USD account, even if I heard some horror stories with accounts being blocked. I reached out to support and inform them that a larger payment would arrive in my account. I asked them if they need any documents to prove where the money originated from. They said it was ok and I didn’t had to send anything. This way I hoped to avoid my account to be blocked. I finally issued the transfer from the US broker to my Revolut account. It took almost two weeks, but in the end the money arrived in my account and I felt relieved that the entire adventure was over!
Next step was to figure out what to do with my nice and shiny pile of… virtual $$$ 🤑
I did the only logical thing in this situation, create a list of pros/cons 🤣
Pros:
- Increase diversity of the cash I owned
- Avoid currency conversion fees when buying financial instruments or goods denominated in USD
Cons:
- Difficult to find a bank in Romania that offers an USD account without additional fees to keep the money for a longer period of time
- Limited availability of USD deposits
- Transfers between USD accounts took a long time and had high fees compared to SEPA transfers in EUR
- Almost no products in Europe are sold in USD
- Exchange rate to other currency at banks were very bad
I ended up using once again Revolut. As part of the free standard plan I could exchange every month with no fee and at a decent rate, up to the equivalent of 5000 RON from USD.
I don’t know if this was the best decision but it was the best I could find with the available information at that time. Feel free to leave a comment with what you have done in a similar situation.