Interactive Brokers have quite low fx fees and ability to fund/withdraw in many currencies. Problem is it takes a while a to open an account and to clear funds.
Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
101–110 of 256 posts
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#102I am surprised that there is no mention of Bitcoin. My current project is also in another country (US) and I live in Europe. I am getting paid in BTC, and I pay even less then via Transferwise. It is cheaper because the company already owns Bitcoin, so it doesn't need to buy them. What I do is: - Getting BTC transferred to a wallet at an exchange I trust - Sell the BTC ones I receive them and put the money on my bank…
Personally I use Bitcoin to transfer money to my home country monthly. It's not much, around 1000-1500 euro (hopefully for just one more month), and it's to pay my credit card debt back home. It's very convenient, fast, and I get the best market price for my euros. Using Transferwise is out of the question since my homeland uses an artificial price for the dollar, and thus if I were to use them I'd lose on about 25% of my country's currency.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#103I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable. Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain…
Are you able to offer any insight (top level, non-confidential, obvs) into how TransferWise works, behind-the-scenes? i.e. how do they actually enact the exchange of the funds? Do they have a contract with one of the big investment banks? Do they work directly via Forex markets? Can they leverage their scale now to minimise actual exchange costs – for example internally matching up (say) a one customer transferring U…
In reality, internalised or not, TransferWise makes lot of money in fees.
On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR (+ 1 USD extra for withdrawal if you already did one this month).
TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#104Over the last year or so it seems like TransferWise has rapidly come onto the scene & taken over much of the landscape for our international contractor payments. The fees tend to be much lower than existing alternatives; importantly, the administrative friction is incredibly low, too. We're able to handle international payments essentially the exact same way we do with most other vendor & contractor payments, via ACH…
> Over the last year or so it seems like TransferWise has rapidly come onto the scene
They've also increased some of the fees over the last year
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#105For travel, is there any benefit to using TransferWise's debit card over a traditional debit/credit card that advertises 0 foreign transaction fees? I remember somewhere about how the conversion rates are dictated by Visa/Mastercard on most credit/debit cards. Wondering how those rates compare to TransferWise's, and if their extra fee on top is justified. Some examples: https://www.schwab.com/checking https://creditc…
In Norway when a bank advertises 0 transaction fees they skip roughly 1.8% that Visa charges for doing currency exchanges.
Visa doesn't charge this fee, it's your bank.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you able to offer any insight (top level, non-confidential, obvs) into how TransferWise works, behind-the-scenes? i.e. how do they actually enact the exchange of the funds? Do they have a contract with one of the big investment banks? Do they work directly via Forex markets? Can they leverage their scale now to minimise actual exchange costs – for example internally matching up (say) a one customer transferring U…
In reality, internalised or not, TransferWise makes lot of money in fees. On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR (+ 1 USD extra for withdrawal if you already did one this month). TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"
> On InteractiveBrokers for example
That is not a consumer-friendly site. Is it even practical for the typical case TransferWise targets: sending a few payments a year, or a few a month?
The pricing page for foreign exchange has the cheapest category as under $1 billion -- is transferring $200 something they'd do? I don't know what a "basis point" is, or "trade value".
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of "loss" I consider it a service price for discoverability and the payment guarantees for hourly projects. I also don't mind paying since so far it's been the best method to get projects for me so far.
Yes, the 20% definitely raises eyebrows. Uber charges 20% I no longer use Upwork, and the "loss" is only one of the reasons. But it's probably the best way to find projects easily though.
Try going for long-term projects or creating relationship with your customers. Once you charge them more then 10k USD the rate is ~6%, which is quite nice to have 94 cents on a dollar. It's something Upwork actually encourages, opposite for Fiverr as example
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#108For travel, is there any benefit to using TransferWise's debit card over a traditional debit/credit card that advertises 0 foreign transaction fees? I remember somewhere about how the conversion rates are dictated by Visa/Mastercard on most credit/debit cards. Wondering how those rates compare to TransferWise's, and if their extra fee on top is justified. Some examples: https://www.schwab.com/checking https://creditc…
Visa and MC charges 0.6% on forex.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#109At least in Europe, SEPA payments are visible abroad the next day (at least according to my experience from transferring to Germany and London from Finland), so that's not too slow.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#110I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable. Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain…
I don't know... the only time I tried to use Transferwise was to make a transfer to Haiti. Their website claims they support it, they allowed for the transfer to be initiated - but in the end it failed for some unknown opaque reason.
I'm sure it works for most large countries, but the reality is that they sell the idea that they can transfer anywhere, list almost every country to give the illusion of ubiquity, but haven't actually tested transfers to all those countries.