You have to pay for the wire transfer. The people at the bank were very nice. One of the reasons I keep my accounts in Wells Fargo is that there's a branch almost everywhere, and every branch is just like the one I use most often. It doesn't matter where you are, you are just another customer with an account. I still have the same accounts that I had in 2004. They don't seem to be place-oriented at WF. The account isn't at a particular branch. It's just a Wells Fargo account.
I would not ever do such a transaction in actual cash. I think the most money I've ever had in actual cash was $10,000. I took that to a mineral show in Denver one time. There, all transactions were done using $100 bills, oddly enough. That particular show does many millions of dollars in business among all of the dealers who go there, and almost all of it is transacted with $100 bills. There are dealers from all over the world there, as there are at the annual Tucson mineral show. Armed security guards are everywhere, and the actual dealers do business in hotel rooms, for the most part.
It's very interesting. $10,000 is just one bundle of $100 bills. Weird. I saw a few purchases take place where people handed over several of those bundles for one transaction. It made me nervous just carrying one bundle, but it was gone soon enough. I ended up buying an entire room full of specimens on the last day of the show for the entire amount I had. The dealer took the bundle of bills, grabbed his suitcase, checked out of the hotel and caught a cab. I packed everything up and loaded it all in the SUV I had rented and drove back to Minnesota with the specimens, which I then sold on my website. Not long after that, I closed that business down and moved on to something else.
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