Paying off US bills after moving back to canada

I was working in the US and have a credit card and other bills to pay in the US, but i'm living back in Canada now, and need to pay them from my Canadian bank.

What's the best way to make payments to my US bank? I opened a US Dollar account in Canada cause i thought that would make things easier, however everywhere in the US tells me that they can't take payments from it, cause the bank is in canada. Even if the funds are already in US dollars.

Has anyone else been in this situation?
How do i best give my money to the bank lol.

So far the best way i can do is to mail a US dollar check (or money order) to them each month, but there's got to be an easier way.

Why not just get a US bank account? They're usually far cheaper than Canadian USD accounts, never really understand the point to those accounts. The only trick to it is that because of the Patriot Act you'll probably need to do it in person.

Steve is right, you would most likely have to travel to the U.S. physically to open a U.S. Account. There are exceptions however. About 2 years ago, I contacted M&T Bank in the States and they said I could open one right from Canada. Most others will simply not allow it due to the act. M&T Bank might have been a good choice but one has to realize it does not have the same gigantic ABM distribution system such as CitiBank or Bank of America and they are restricted to business in just a handful of States.

Why can't they accept a US$ cheque from a Canadian bank? That's rediculous.

I already have a US bank account as well, its the issue of getting money into that account from Canada that's the problem.

Even my bank in canada (who has a US division) can't easily transfer money between themselves without having to resort to a wire transfer (along with the fee's of course)

Yeah, I had that problem if you need to wire the money regularly it can get expensive. I used cheques to get around it but that requires you to be in the US to present the Canadian cheque to the US bank. Because it's in USD they generally don't charge you extra fees or if they do it's not as much as the wire charge.

The only thing you can really do to save money is dump a large amount of money into the US account, which is easy to do if you have a large amount of money!

You can transfer funds with an online company called http://www.customhouse.com/

Set up an account with them. I know of a few folks that use it.

But that's for currency exchange, that's not his problem, his problem is wiring USD from Canada to the US because they can't do direct debits from a Canadian USD account.

One way around it might be to open up a USD account with a US bank that has branches in Canada. But I suspect their bank charges will be higher so you may not save much.

[quote=Custom House]Make global payments with confidence. Custom House is your trusted source for all of your foreign transactions and purchases.[/quote]

From that, I understand it that you can make bill payments via Custom House, and AFAIK, that's how several people over at Visa Journey use the service, only the other way around while in US to pay off Canadian bills.

You can transfer funds thru Pay Pal as well from a Canadian bank account to a US bank account, but there are fees with that.

Well there are fees using any method, c'est la vie.

Depends on the frequency and so on as to which is best, I was trying to think of a way that didn't involve wire fees at all.