Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer

I have overseas clients whose accounts payables are completely inflexible and insist upon mailing me paper checks. I’m using a forex broker at the moment who gets me mid-market plus about 1.2% to convert into USD.

Does anyone have a better way to receive paper checks that doesn’t involve me establishing a bank account in the sending nation?

My point with Transferwise is also: They are not really transferring money. Whereas with BTC, you have a transaction. With Transferwise, they sum up all their transactions and do larger bulk transactions at the end of each month or quarter or whatever.

So with using BTC, you actually have the BTC when it is transferred. The banking system has to cheat itself to keep low fees and fast transaction times. With BTC, you may wait 10-15 minutes. With Fiat, you would usually wait a day or two. But, you can "cheat" your way through the system.

One way I don't get why people won't support BTC: It is a system where everyone can contribute, see every transaction and improve it. The banking system however is old, slow and deeply flawed. And there is no way of improving it. So yeah, even if BTC would be more expensive and slow, I would still use it more often then not, since it's software, and you can fix and improve software.

@thoraway1010

Thank you for not bothering to read my post. You know, the bit where I said "long-established reputable, not fly-by-night".

You know, the bit where I am talking about a long-established company with offices in the US and Europe ? A company that is regulated in all juristictions, pays its taxes and obeys all laws ?

You know, the bit where I talk about a company that hates "crap" on their network as much as you hate receiving it.

You know, the company that actively takes steps to identify and deal with miscreants on its network ?

Well of course not, because you want to tarnish all VOIP providers with the same brush !

Thanks. I guess you're right that people like me who don't trade billions per month pay their most expensive forex rates. But it's not a cutoff, just a price tier, and still far cheaper than TransferWise or any other option I know of for exchanging non-institutional quantities of currency.

To clarify the terms in that table: one basis point is 1/100 of 1%, as they themselves clarify in a footnote rather than assuming all readers know it. And trade value is, well, the amount you trade. :) The footnote for that term clarifies that they convert and charge this commission in whatever currency you have configured as the base currency for your account. (For example, I've chosen USD for my base currency since most of my transactions are US stocks on US exchanges, even though I'm in Canada and therefore the legal entity I'm officially dealing with is IB's Canadian arm.)

So, to convert anywhere up to US$100,000 (or its foreign currency equivalent) to any other currency, they charge their minimum fee of US$2 - mathematically, 2 / (1/100 of 0.20) = 100,000. Above that and up to US$1 billion, you take the amount you're trading, multiply by 1/100 of 0.20, and that's the fee.

$2 is a ridiculously low fee to convert five USD figures or less of currency, given that they also directly pass through the very tight exchange rates collectively quoted by their suppliers without building any profit for them into the rate itself.

PayPal's customer service is atrocious to consumers as well, especially if you fall between the gaps and get asked to do some weird KYC.

Two months ago, they asked me to provide charity information for my personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who was interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.