Saturday 28 April 2012

How to Buy US Dollars to Purchase a US Property

To purchase our property in the US, we needed to convert Australian Dollars into US Dollars. This was a gamble in itself, making sure we got the best exchange rate and taking on all of the risks that come with forex investing. We had to make sure we got a good exchange rate when we did get our US dollars.

Our method in trading foreign currency was fairly simple, we knew there was always going to be ups and downs in the value of the dollar. We looked at the historical figures of the USD/AUD conversion rates and if the current rate was above the average then we figured it would be a good deal. This AUD/USD Comparison has the figures from 1990 to today.

The average over the last 22 years is 1.00AUD = 0.74USD. We purchased US dollars over the period of a few months ago to average out the exchange rate and managed to get an average rate of 1.00 AUD = 1.03USD which is quite high compared to the last 2 decades.

The Aussie dollar will drift back towards the 90 cents mark as the current exchange rate is having a very negative impact on the mining and the export industry as a whole. When this occurs, not only will we make money from our US property investing, we will also make money from foreign currency exchange.

4 comments:

  1. Hi just wondering where you stored the USD you purchased? Do you have a US bank account over the States or something similar?

    Cheers,
    Sabrina

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    Replies
    1. Hi Sabrina,

      Read this post for a story we had about trying to set up a US Bank account -

      http://streamlineinvestingaustralia.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/how-to-set-up-us-bank-account_10.html

      Anyway, we do not have a US bank account, we will set one up when we visit the US some time later this year, in the mean time our rent is collected on behalf of our property manager, she issues statements whenever we need so we can keep track of our money.

      As for purchasing the property over there, we used a broker account on the internet called Interactive Brokers, we were able to deposit funds in AUD, transfer to USD at a really good rate, and then transfer directly from the Interactive Brokers account directly into the Escrow account for the property.

      Hope this has helped.

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    2. I wish I knew all this before! Aussie dollars have dropped a fair bit from a month ago :(. Oh well, something to keep in mind in the future.

      Thanks very much,
      Sabrina

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