Thought I’d pass on this tip, since a lot of flutes are bought and sold overseas.
If you buy something overseas, a wire transfer or money transfer is a huge pain in the ass, and expensive and slow. A friend of mine just bought a flute and bought a pre-paid credit card in the seller’s name and mailed it to the person. That way, as well, there are records of the transactions, and if it gets lost, it can be traced. The issue of currency exchange is also essentially moot. You can also do things like have a code to activate it once things have changed hands and so forth.
If you live in the US or Canada, this is a very easy and inexpensive way to send money overseas:
https://www.xe.com/fx/
A bit of a pain to set up (it’s a bank, after all), but very easy to use. If you’re planning to send money overseas more than once, this is very worth the effort.
The only method I have used is direct transfers, it´s very easy for me as I do it from my own PC and it costs about 3 Euro.
I don´t use credit cards and and I´m satisifed with direct transfers, it takes about 3-5 days for the money to show up on the receivers account.
/Peter
You’re lucky, you’re in the Euro zone. Making a wire transfer from my bank in the USA to Europe would cost me about US$50, if they haven’t hiked up the prices yet. Using www.xe.com/fx i can send a bank draft by mail for free (!) or wire money for US$10.
g