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Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

blog.jurn.io

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Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#131

Post by wtmt »

briodf wrote: post #20

Great post Jurn, thanks for participating in the effort against hidden exchange rate markups. If you want to check for yourself how much you could save with TransferWise (or one of their competitors) vs banks or PayPal, we've built a comparison site for international money transfer: www.monito.com which compares live exchange rates and fees for any amount you'd like to transfer between two countries/currencies (e.g.…

I wanted to provide you feedback as well as alert others reading these comments. Your site doesn’t list anything other than Transferwise for transfers from India to USA, even though options like InstaRem and others exist. Based on this, I’m not sure how comprehensive your service is to compare providers for cross border transfers. I see you have InstaRem and others for some other currency combinations (including the inverse, sending money from USA to India).

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#132

Post by goatherders »

emdowling wrote: post #6

I’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…

Love Transferwise. Until a month or so ago I was using Xoom (paypal) and it was both more expensive and slower.

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#133

Post by fennecfoxen »

decentralised wrote: post #130
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moving one billion USD worth of BTC can cost as little as 0.065 BTC or ~440 USD Which is ridiculous, given anyone (legally) moving a billion dollars pays zero for an instantaneous Fedwire.

Not familiar with Fedwire. Surely it won't be free to move fiat via any payment network. Do you happen to have a source? PS: seems not to be available to retail customers?

The "Fedwire Funds Service" is the Federal Reserve's wire transfer payment system used to move USD. I'm actually writing an integration to it right this moment (the old fixed-width format, not the new XML one, yay). Naturally this interface is not available directly to retail customers, but if you actually send a wire transfer from your bank, this is the system you will use.

Your bank will generally make this available to you through some online interface. If not, you can visit the teller. They will likely charge you $20-$40 to send a wire if you are a small account, but, even with something like Chase's mid-level "Signature" checking (~$10-$20k minimum to avoid monthly fees iirc) they will waive this fee. And, of course, if you're really moving a billion, not only would you have a banking relationship where your wire fees are waived, that fee would be peanuts anyway.

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#134

Post by nanexcool »

needle0 wrote: post #61
tchaffee wrote: post #19

Based on my own experience doing international transfer over many years, the article is pretty accurate. However there is another option, but it does have more risk. Bitcoin. I'm not much of a fan of cryptocurrency in the first place. But international money transfers with low fees is the first real use that actually justifies Bitcoin for me. My credit union charges $20 for a wire transfer. And the transaction fees o…

Are stablecoins viable in the real world for this kind of use case? Anyone have any firsthand experience?

I live in Argentina and have been getting paid in Dai (stablecoin on Ethereum) for over 2 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHji4x5C1q0

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#135

Post by benkuhn »

> Most of them are not classified as banks and run without banking licenses and governmental oversight. They are more convenient and cheaper but definitely a little riskier as well.

This is really misleading. (Disclosure: I work for a remittance provider.)

It's true that non-bank money service businesses do not operate as banks, but it's totally false that they "run without... governmental oversight" or are "a little riskier."

The level of government oversight of non-bank MSB's is extreme by the standards of anything but banking. For example in the US, you have to apply to each state government individually for a license to send transfers from that state. It takes years and is extremely onerous. Many of our applications ran into the hundreds of pages of paperwork and were followed by weeks of on-site examinations plus an intensity of financial auditing usually reserved for companies nearing IPO.

(In Europe the situation is better because MSB regulation happens at the EU level. This regulatory difference is a big part of why Europe has a much larger share of great fintech startups compared to other sectors.)

On risk, most regulators require money transmitters to insure their liabilities to customers so that, if they ever collapse, the insurer will be able to make their customers whole. In our case, we never have liabilities to customers (because we pay out instantly) but we still have to buy this insurance... kind of a belt-and-suspenders approach.

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#136

Post by briodf »

wtmt wrote: post #131
briodf wrote: post #20

Great post Jurn, thanks for participating in the effort against hidden exchange rate markups. If you want to check for yourself how much you could save with TransferWise (or one of their competitors) vs banks or PayPal, we've built a comparison site for international money transfer: www.monito.com which compares live exchange rates and fees for any amount you'd like to transfer between two countries/currencies (e.g.…

I wanted to provide you feedback as well as alert others reading these comments. Your site doesn’t list anything other than Transferwise for transfers from India to USA, even though options like InstaRem and others exist. Based on this, I’m not sure how comprehensive your service is to compare providers for cross border transfers. I see you have InstaRem and others for some other currency combinations (including the…

Thanks for your feedback. Monito.com strives to list as many options as possible and be the most exhaustive source of information about international money transfer fees worldwide. However, we're not always able to access all data as no worldwide regulations require banks or money transfer services to be transparent about their fees and exchange rates (yet).

That being said, in the case of money transfers from India to the USA: InstaReM temporarily suspended money transfers from India last month. As soon as this is re-activated, they will once again appear in our comparison table on all supported corridors from India.

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#137

Post by fierarul »

brudgers wrote: post #124

There is a simpler solution. Charge more money for your freelance work. Higher fees compound. Cost savings diminish. Even better higher fees select for better clients. Working for clients where profits depend on your cost savings is a race to the bottom. And when clients pay more you can afford to outsource the work of setting up cost savings processes instead of doing the work yourself. There's nothing wrong with sa…

Yes, easy, just charge more! I wonder why doesn't everybody just do it? Because it's non-trivial, it involves risk and you might end up making less money!

While cost saving has almost no risk. Here's a relevant piece of the article:

> But what if it's a 6-month project and instead of billing them 1000 per month, you are billing them 10.000 per month?

> Now you could have saved €150 per month for 6 months, meaning you lost €900 just on currency conversion on this project. Ouch!

> It could very well be that you can buy a brand new MacBook Pro every few years with just the savings on your international payments.

A business is also not good if you just let money slip through your fingers.

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#138

Post by wtmt »

ashleysmithgpu wrote: post #33

Just to add a dissenting voice to the conversation, I recently attempted to transfer some money with transferwise and they refused just after I had uploaded all of my ID etc. In the end I went with worldremit and they were much easier to deal with. Slightly more expensive but I'd choose that over the hassle of tw.

I’m suspecting that the answer to my question would be no, but will still ask anyway. Did Transferwise give you any usable reason for their refusal or was it a blanket “sorry, we can’t do business with you” that many companies use for all kinds of reasons while hiding behind the garb of security and fraud?

Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

#139

Post by tonfa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93
decentralised wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs for transactions are not fixed to a percentage of the total amount sent but on the size of the transaction and the network congestion. Moving one billion USD worth of BTC can cost as little as 0.065 BTC or ~440 USD. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne... https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb...

> Moving one billion USD worth of BTC can cost as little as 0.065 BTC or ~440 USD Which is ridiculous, given anyone (legally) moving a billion dollars pays zero for an instantaneous Fedwire.

If you want to convert between money, it's slight more expensive but marginally so (15k USD for converting 1B with IB, 8k if you change more than 5B per month)
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