I sent around 27 USD using electrum wallet. Before completing a transaction I received the warning that the fees are almost 50% from total. I moved the fees button to minimum and the warning still appeared saying that the fees are around 24% So, I completed the transaction by using minimal fees.
Additionally to what others have said ,you can customize fees below that minimum suggested fee.
It is possible to send for less than 0.5usd even in the actual prices. But your transaction will take many days to get confirmed. Sometimes this is not a problem (if you are just transferring to another wallet you own , for example)
To customize fees in electrum you can follow this guide
The form on the send tab is used to send money. The amount you enter there is the amount the recipient gets. To control how much you spend in fees you click pay and then advanced to see this window:
As you can see fees depend on the size of your transaction in bytes and the fee rate in terms of satoshis per byte. There are 100,000,000 (100 million) satoshis in a bitcoin.
In the transaction shown in the screenshot above the recipient’s address is the first output while the others are change addresses belonging to the sender’s wallet. The recipient gets 0.02btc, the fee is 294 satoshis and the total cost to the sender is 0.02000294 btc.
https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-manually-set-transaction-fees/Reducing inputs (as suggested by LoyceV) will reduce the total transaction size, and total fees.