I am getting some family help for my down-payment for a house I am buying. It will be about 30,000 dollars. From my father-in-law and also my sister.
Based on reading past threads about this very situation, I plan on transferring the amount to my American account and then sending the money to a (still to be opened) Sony Bank account. From my understanding this will incur the least fees and have the best exchange rate for us.
Things I am aware of from reading other posts:
1. The bank may wonder where this money came from. My goal is to tell them it is from savings and is for a loan.
2. It may be better to have my father send the money to me and say it is a gift for a down-payment. Would this be the safer route?
Has anyone done this recently or have a better plan?
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6 comments
I have received a large sum of money in one payment (into a Rakuten account), I just had to send the bank some docs to show what the money was from/for and then it was fine. Delayed everything about a week I guess. 30k should be totally fine.
I think Sony Bank is still considered the best fee-wise for receiving USD.
I’ve done this a few times. First, years agon, we were buying a NYC coop and needed to show liquid assets (ie cash) of a certain amount. FiL loaned us money which we received into our joint savings and let sit for a while. After we closed on the apartment, we sent the money back to him. From our end it was not an issue, and we didn’t have (or more precisely report) any gift tax either in Japan or in the US. (And because f/x moved against us, we lost money in sending the yen amount back. I think if FiL had any problems he would have let us know.
Second I sent money from a joint US bank account to a relatively new account I opened here with Prestia, as part of a downpayment for an apartment being purchased with a Prestia mortgage. This was still while Prestia was using Citibank systems and the remitting bank happened to be Citibank. While in theory the Prestia relationship person knew the money was coming from Citi and what it was for and the date it was to come, when it did come, another Prestia person called me to ask what it was and what it was to be used for (A: from my savings to my Prestia account to be used to purchase property with a Prestia mortgage.) No issues.
More recently, did the same, but this time from the joint US account to my wife’s long standing back account at SMBC (not Prestia), as we are getting another apartment this time in her name. She also got contacted and said basically same thing — monies were from her savings to be used to purchase property. Again no problem. We need to make two more transfers for this transaction. My wife thinks as long as an individual transfer is less than 30 million yen, there’s no problems (and our transfers thus far and in the future both will be less than that individually and collectively). Not sure why she thinks that’s the trigger amount, though.
TLDR; anecdotally, you should be fine, with this amount and with this stated purpose.
Banks don’t care about the origins of the money so long as it isn’t drug money. So there shouldn’t be any barriers for getting that amount of money in. In some cases, they may ask you to fill out some paperwork.
Then the only question is whether the taxman will start snooping around. I don’t have hard proof of this but my gut feeling is that “high profile” domestic and international bank transfers are instantly searchable NTA and they may want to collect gift taxes since 30 grand well exceeds the 1.1M annual limit.
However there is a one time up to 10M tax exempt allowance for purchasing a home that you can fill out in your kakuteishinkoku. So you can use that to exempt yourself from taxes in the worst case (albeit probably unlikely) scenario the NTA does ask questions.
> It may be better to have my father send the money to me and say it is a gift for a down-payment. Would this be the safer route?
I very much doubt it. While I have no particular insight into those banks’ AML procedures, common sense would suggest that the risk of money laundering is lower when the account is in the same name.
I’ve transferred amounts in this region from accounts in my own name to Sony Bank and had no issue, FWIW.
Banks are getting a lot stricter these days with where the money came from. When i bought my house in 2017 i moved over around 4000万円 and the bank hardly asked me any questions. Last year when i moved 200万円　for a downpayment on a car the bank wanted details of my kids, wife and even wanted a picture of my bank statement from the bank i sent money from in my home country. I refused to show them my bank statement and they were saying next time i sent a large amount it will be muzukashii.
Moved over 1000万 and they called me. I told them it was from my American bank and for a home rebuild and they said thanks. FFG partner local bank. I think it helped that the name on both ends was me.