Cashing US4 cheques in UK£ bank accounts

[mrMister]

Title should read: "Cashing US$ cheques in UK£ bank accounts" (can't find a way to edit title)

I'm about to hit the $100 payment mark with my adsense account. Does anyone know the kind of charges I can expect for putting cheques from a US dollars account in to my UK bank account?

Is there anyway of increasing the minimum cheque size in Adsense to offset the costs?

[cleanup]

There are quite a few posts about this. I cash with Natwest. Takes about a week for the funds to show up and costs about 10pounds, I think someone found barclays to be slightly cheaper.

[mrMister]

Haven't seen the exchange rate lately, but assuming the "two dollars for the price of a pound" ratio, £10 on a $100 cheque amounts to 20% lost. Is there any way to increase the minimum cheque size to say $400 which would reduce this to just 5%?

[Dynamoo]

Paying cheques into your account in a batch will tend to reduce the cost-per-cheque. Until recently I tended to get several smallish dollar cheques a month plus a bigger AdSense cheque, and then pay in about 2 months worth at the same time.

[RonPK]

You can ask Google to hold the monthly payments for as long as up to 6 months. It's in the support section, under 'payments'.

[frox]

RonPK: really? I haven't seen that. I must check better!

EDIT: Yes, it's there. Strange, though, that they want you to email them evry time to hold paments manually!

An option in your control panel would be handy...

[HarryM]

I have an account with Lloyds, and they charge me £5 and the amount shows in my account within a couple of days.

I'm not sure, but I think it works out less if you pay in several cheques at once.

[publish]

Either sooner or later you may want to consider a CitiBank UK - USD account.

You can pay USD cheques in directly (no fees or dodgy exchange rates last time I checked) and your money's stored in USD.

Then you can do a transfer direct in to your main account. I think that's what they call a BACS transfer and I don't believe there's any fees for that. Could be wrong though.

There are fees however if you don't keep a balance of £2k in the account. I think it's a fee of $20 a month which might work out cheaper depending how much USD you're getting each month.

Their website has a lot more information on all this.