Haven't seen any discussions about this, so thought I'd ask the experts in this group. I've been looking into the cheapest way to send JPY from my Japanese bank to USD in my US brokerage account for investing. From other threads, it sounds like Sony and Shinsei are the common recommendations.
I've previously read threads about people who used Wise as a cheap way to wire USD. As in, not using Wise for the conversion, but rather just using Wise as the middle-man to wire funds, since Wise charges just a flat fee of 3.5 USD to send USD wires.
So then that gave me an idea. What if it's possible to do the same thing with JPY wires through Wise into IBKR LLC? According to this page, sending wires "from your JPY balance" only costs a flat fee of 181.75 JPY. And according to this page's calculator, it seems like it's free to receive a furikomi into your Wise account. So after adding the 2 USD fee from IBKR LLC to convert from JPY to USD, it sounds like you would be able to do the whole transaction for the very cheap fee of 181.75 JPY + 2 USD.
Of course this method has some caveats, like needing to stay within the 1 mil JPY limit applied to Wise accounts, but otherwise, this seems like a surprisingly cheap way for JPY to USD conversions, on par or even cheaper than Sony/Shinsei at certain amounts.
Am I missing something? Is my math completely off? Has anyone ever tried this method?
by kitsunegi