That's 1.8%. What are the current spread rates for AUD-BTC and BTC-USD?
For comparison I get 0.6 - 1.4% from an online specialized currency service, taking a couple of days. Set-up was a bit involved. How good is connecting BTC to real world bank accounts these days?
Buying BTC for 2500 AUD on https://anxbtc.com/ right now would net you 3.875512102 BTC, which can be sold for 2302.054188836 USD on Bitstamp. At current exchange rates that's a 2% loss on the transfer alone, and you'd incur the wire transfer fee anyway, when sending the USD from Bitstamp to your US bank account.
I think the bottleneck is currently the BTCAUD market, where the spread is 1.43% (http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/anxhkAUD.html), and also liquidity on US-based exchanges where you can avoid the subsequent international wire transfer.
Try Transfer Wise. It's a very useful middle ground between the current method of SWIFT and the potential of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It costs much less than a SWEIFT transfer and is much quicker.
Agreed. To illustrate how broken the SWIFT system is for those unfamiliar with international wires: Last week I wired AUS$2,500 from an account I control in Australia to an account I control in the US. It touched 4(!) banks in the process, who collectively took ~$45 in fees ($25 of that being a total surprise to me, represented only by a small asterisk footnote in the fee schedule of my initiating Australian bank).
I became a huge Bitcoin cheerleader following the experience.