I`m trying to send a small amount of BitCoin via electrum wallet to my hardware wallet & i`m getting about 40% fee.
I then adjusted the fee paid bar left to the max & its lower but still high saying - "the fee for this transaction seems unusually high 5.06%".
For comparison I transferred about $300 at the weekend from an exchange to hardware wallet and was charged less than $1.
Is this an electrum thing? is there anything else i can do?, as far as i know i only have one active address in my wallet
Thanks
When it comes to fees, you should never trust to Electrum because from my experience, it sucks at fee calculation but on the other hand, Sparrow is superb at fee calculation.
I`m trying to send a small amount of BitCoin
There's your problem. You should avoid sending
dust amounts of Bitcoin. Even if you pay a high transaction fee to send 0.00001 BTC, the receiver will have to spend most of it on fees if he uses it. It's better to use Bitcoin LN or a low-fee altcoin for paying small amounts.
That's a good advice and on top of that, I want to add that people should start using of Coin Control to make smarter transactions and control their UTXOs. For example, OP, there might be a case when you have to pay 0.001 BTC but you have inputs of 0.001 BTC, 0.00057 BTC, 0.0002BTC, 0.0003 BTC. If fees are high, it's better to use coin control feature and pay with 0.001 input but if fees are very low, it's better to consolidate your inputs and pay with 0.00057 + 0.0002 + 0.0003 BTC.