Postbank (Germany) - transferring money to the US - what are the best options?

For those who are interested, I am answering my own question:

We used Postbank and transferred 6000 Euro, we chose to Transfer in US$, and selected Shared Fees.

There were three fees in total:

• Postbank took 1.50 Euro when executing the transaction
• An unspecified intermediary took 20.00 US$ for unspecified reasons (currency conversion, I assume)
• The receiver bank (Chase) took 15.00 US$, as advertised on their website.
• the applied exchange ratio was 1.11155 US$/EUR, confirmed to us at the time of submittal; this matches exactly the intraday trading rate at the day and time of sending (2016-06-30 10:29 am MESZ!)
  • It took two business days to appear in the US account and be fully usable at 7 am.

All in all, I paid ~37$; this is about half of what I expected; and I got a perfect exchange rate. Postbank might have its downsides, but it seems they are still a good deal.

After doing this many times, my preferred method is:

• Select OUR.
• Have the German bank do the currency conversion.

The reason being that the US banks will use every chance possible to take your money in fees. Usually the German bank website will tell you what the current exchange rate. You were correct in selecting Transfer in $ and got the exchange rate. In my experience if you transfer in Euros, the US bank at the other end, will take about 3-5%, because they can.

Selecting OUR means that you only have the fee taken out by the Source bank. By doing shared, it looks like both banks took their full fee. If you chose OUR, I'm fairly certain you just would have paid the 1.50 and the 20. Chase would not have taken the 15.