Chapla, I live in France and I take cheques and transfers from French guests and Europeans in general since there are no charges. I pay my taxes and also include visitor taxes in my rates (I know some owners who make you pay for the VT at the end of your stay)

What I don't want is to pay something like 30 euros on a transfer to get the money, and if my guests don't have to pay on their side, I'm happy for them too.
I don't trust Paypal (because of the phishings I receive)and I can't accept credit cards because I'm a private owner. Voilà!

...........yeah,right!

Chapala
The OP clearly states that this arrangement was to save her money. The landlord was prepared to take a wire transfer but that would cost her $35-50.

We rented a house in Provence through VRBO. The owner requested that we wire the money for the down payment. This kind of transaction is very expensive in the USA--40.00 or more. I asked him if his bank would accept a certified check in dollars(the equivalent of the euro amount). He checked it out; his bank OK'd the transaction, and we mailed him a certified check. Hopefully, we will find other landlords who will allow us to make deposits this way.

The original post was regarding service charges for international money transfers, it has nothing to do with paying or avoidig taxes.

Don't attribute larcenous thoughts to Coco or any other poster please.

Wow-word of the day-larcenous.....!!!!!!!Have aglass of wine please,it's only Monday and pay your taxes!

I think it might have been your second post on this thread that was the issue. It is one thing to speculate on whether people are asking for cash to avoid tax, but it is quite another matter to post a disbelieving "yeah,right" in response to a well reasoned post from a very respected Fodorite (hope you don't mind being called a Fodorite Coco!).

No for me to have a glass of wine - the G&T hit the spot quite nicely

oops last piece should have been "not necessary for me"!

Susanna-it's an interesting premise, but I wonder how many landlords would be willing?
Personally, I wish more accepted Paypal.

Coco-if you don't mind, I'm curious as to why you don't trust Paypal? Your comment was almost identical to the one I received from a B&B owner in Grande Bressac. She wanted us to wire a deposit of 50 euros which would have cost me $30! Thankfully she allowed us to send a USD check for deposit which she will give back once we arrive.

I have a paypal account which I've used many times to both make and receive payments via ebay. My understanding is that the phishing is nothing more than Spam which can be ignored. As long as you only log into your Paypal directly (as opposed to any emails you receive) there should be no problem. You would have to pay an extra percentage (about 4%) to be able to accept credit cards however.
If you have a website for your business, you might be able to accept credit cards via a checkout basket as well, depending on the type of site you have and what your site hosting allows.

I know if all things were equal, if I could pay by CC, I would be more likely to rent that place over one where I could not.

For our upcoming trip we have organised Travellers Cash Cards and loaded foreign currency onto them. Why not use those? thereby you are not opening an account as such but just sending a card with the deposit loaded on, then when final payment is required load that amount on for them to draw and you then determine the exchange rate you pay as well. These cards are not linked to any bank account so are safe and can be replaced if lost.
We are in Australia but I assume they are available in the US too.

Interesting concept.
A risk with leaving the account open is that, after the landlord gets his deposit, he abandons or otherwise enables a third party to have it. Said third party would then be able to "hack" the pin number, using software; thus, when the account next had money, he could "re-hack" the pin and take the money intended for landlord #2. You might then be at risk for assuming #2 got the money, and arrive at an apartment leased to someone who paid normally.

I have not heard of Travelers Check Cards, will have to look into that too.

Tomboy: thank you, that is just what I was looking for. Ack mentioned having the landlord give you the card back when you are staying in the apartment after they have taken all the money so I would think that would take care this problem.

Great suggestions, keep them coming!

I too think it is an interesting idea. But what would happen if the ATM 'eats' the card? There would be no way for the landlord to get it back as it would have your name on it.

Tom

<i>Said third party would then be able to &quot;hack&quot; the pin number, using software...</i>

A bank card PIN is not written anywhere on the credit, debit, or ATM card. It is in the bank's computer. When a customer enters it into the keypad on the terminal, it is encrypted and sent to the bank for verification. Hacking it &quot;using software&quot; would be infinitely complicated. Read: impossible.

I designed software systems using IBM's Transaction Processing Facility that underlies most banking networks, so I know whereof I speak.

A word from a house owner:
We accept bank transfers, bank drafts, and PayPal for our houses in France. We don’t accept credit cards, as we, like Coco and many of the people you will be dealing with, are not a business.

Each of these has some difficulty for us.

Bank transfers attract a lot of charges, for the sender and the receiver. Your branch, the main branch, the receiving/correspondent bank here, and our branch, all take their cut. We usually accept our own bank’s charge, and credit people for the original amount we received, which is often less than they sent – not a great way to start a relationship! The highest charge we saw was for 50 Euros, on an Australian transfer – all before the payment reached us.

Theoretically a bank draft/cashier’s cheque in Euros should be better, and it is, if it’s drawn on a French bank. Foreign (i.e. North American) banks normally have a relationship with a correspondent bank in Europe. Although Europe now has a single currency, it does not yet have a central clearing bank. If your bank is connected with a French bank, we pay no extra charges. If however its correspondent bank is in another country we pay over 20 Euros in charges. Not a lot on a large rental, but on a small deposit, of about 200 Euros, a hefty percentage.

Regarding payment by bank cheque in Dollars, we really don't like those, as there is often a charge to clear the cheque PLUS an exchange charge. Although we accept charges that our bank assesses, we don't accept the exchange charge - I know it's not your fault, but it's not mine either, and this county's currently is not the US dollar.

We signed up with PayPal because these approaches seemed to be getting more and more difficult. We actually lost bookings because it was costly and too difficult for some of our customers to find a way of sending us payment. It was the only way I found to accept credit card payment, although it does mean that we pay almost 4% on every credit card transaction. We accept that, but I certainly know people who wouldn’t. We signed up before the latest round of 'phishing' and have had no trouble. As someone else mentioned, as long as you go directly to your account you should be fine. However, I find that some of my French friends are still leery of dealing through the Internet - could be because they are older and more conservative.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the original proposal. It still seems fairly complicated for someone to set this up just to rent an apartment. It shouldn't be more complicated for me as an owner than taking a cheque to the bank, but somehow it does. I think that many French owners would not understand what you are trying to do, and be suspicious. However, it’s certainly an interesting approach.

It is one way to do it, but seems rather a lot of effort for $35.

The person on the European side would not be able to check the bank balance with the card. Not that they need to anyway. Foreign ATM machines know nothing about what anybody has on their account, just whether or not there is enough money (or credit line) for the requested withdrawal.

Robespierre:
&quot;Hacking it &quot;using software&quot; would be infinitely complicated. Read: impossible&quot;
The PIN need not be written on the card. The software could find it.
Said software's available on the internet, going price ~$150. Small price to pay if one is amoral enough to use it. If it's a 4 digit PIN, that's 10,000 combinations, about 1/x of a second for a 2 MHz chip. True, there are counter-measures, but given the skills of a devoted hacker, and the apparent ease of penetration these people often have, I wouldn't leave the account open.

I have sent a personal check to pay for something in Europe. I figured out as close as I could with the exchange rate and made it out in dollars and mailed the check. No problem.

You could always do that and if it was more or less figure it out when you paid the balance.

<i>Said software's available on the internet, going price ~$150.</i>

I doubt if a brute-force attack on the PIN would work very well - systems don't stand around while 10,000 attempts take place.

Would you please post a description of what this $150 software does? TPF systems are bulletproof - if it were actually possible to crack one for that kind of money, ATM crime would be pandemic.

And for a real tool that was useful, $150 is way, way low. I used to see satellite TV hacks that cost in the thousands.