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I'm a US citizen and I've been living in Japan for over 10 years now. Whenever I had to send money back to the US, it was always to my parents. Mostly it was to pay them back for something they bought and had shipped to me over here. I'd always got the impression that overseas bank transfers had huge fees (a percentage?), so I'd always opted to get an international money order from the Post Office over here and send it over by mail. Now, I'm just about ready to move back to the US. Due to the nature of my job (IT, software development, etc), I can work from anywhere in the world with net access, so I've made arrangements with my current employer to continue working for them as an independent contractor. What would be a good, cheap way to have them pay me? (cheap, because of course any extra fees come out of my pocket) I've looked into: - Bank transfers, which I already mentioned seems really expensive - PayPal, which not only seems like it has a lot of fees, plus I need to get a Business Account, plus I'm not sure how much my company would like having to pay me with a credit card each month - "Money Gram", or something similar, which, last time I checked, had a flat fee of something under $50 or so, and I would go to pick up in person every month Does anyone have experience with this?
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Aug 28, 2016 04:14
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| # ? May 6, 2024 09:20 |
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I work frequently with money transfers and generally they will either be expensive or complicated or both depending on the amount, country, money service and your ability to juggle and document the money for tax purposes. Best options are Paypal, Western Union and MoneyGram. If you and your employer can use normal Paypal, that is just sending you money to an regular paypal account on your end, that tends to be the most convenient when it comes just shoving money off into your direction. As long as your not rolling in Drug Dealer/Minecraft/Tf2 Hats level transaction volume, its fine. Pretty much everyone hides their currency conversion fees. You basically have to calculate it yourself. In general, Paypal charges more on average for currency conversions. On the sly your employer can send the money to you as a gift for cheaper but that can get them in trouble if they try to write off that money as a business expense for taxes. Sending money from the US to another country is generally cheaper and easier than the reverse. D.Ork Bimboolean fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Aug 28, 2016 |
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Aug 28, 2016 05:52
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D.Ork Bimboolean posted:I work frequently with money transfers and generally they will either be expensive or complicated or both depending on the amount, country, money service and your ability to juggle and document the money for tax purposes. Best options are Paypal, Western Union and MoneyGram. Thanks for the advice! My employer has supposedly used Paypal before for something, so that might be the way to go. Looking just now, Western Union had some thing about sending money international directly between bank accounts. Not sure if it would end up cheaper than just directly asking for a transfer from their bank to mine, but I'll check about the fees, etc. Paypal is still kind of confusing. I thought I'd have to get a business account, but it's not like I'd be getting a large volume of transactions, just one or two per month. For personal accounts, it said something about 2.5% on a transaction over 3,000USD, which is over more than fifty bucks per monthly salary... I guess that's an OK baseline, but then add another few percent for the JPY-to-USD exchange. Ugh.
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Aug 28, 2016 09:07
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I use Xoom to transfer money back and forth from Aus and the US but mostly because PayPal caught on and wouldn't let me have two accounts in the same name (I was transferring money to pay loans back in Aus). I tried money gram as well but Xoom had been the easiest.
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Aug 28, 2016 10:49
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Miranda posted:I use Xoom to transfer money back and forth from Aus and the US but mostly because PayPal caught on and wouldn't let me have two accounts in the same name (I was transferring money to pay loans back in Aus). I tried money gram as well but Xoom had been the easiest. Seems like they stopped offering service to the US? It still lists Australia, though. Maybe Paypal shut off service to the US.
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Aug 28, 2016 12:09
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Assuming your employer is located in Japan you could use GoRemit. It's kind of a pain in the rear end to set up, but you can send as much money as you want and it's always a flat 2,000 yen fee. If you send a lot they'll make sure tell them it's not going to North Korea though.
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Aug 29, 2016 03:02
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Seconding GoRemit, I've used it for years. Setup is simple enough provided you can use Google for 10 seconds to get your bank's SWIFT code and such. However given that you won't actually be living in Japan I'd recommend having your employer setup with GoRemit instead. Since you won't actually be in Japan you'll be screwed if your bank has to snail mail you for so any reason (they won't let you use an overseas address). They did call me once about the North Korea thing... think I sent 3mio yen or something? Also just as a heads-up, the cut-off for the Japan-side bank reporting overseas remittances to the National Tax Agency is 1mio yen. In any case whatever bank/payment processor your company uses should be able to tell them how they can pay you. Have they really never had to pay some company/person outside of Japan?
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Aug 29, 2016 09:42
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zmcnulty posted:In any case whatever bank/payment processor your company uses should be able to tell them how they can pay you. Have they really never had to pay some company/person outside of Japan? Yeah, I'm their first and only foreign employee. They did some (likely) off-the-books compensation for some part-time translators or something, though, and that was apparently through PayPal. I'll let them know about the GoRemit thing, though. A flat 2,000 JPY fee is not that bad.
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Aug 29, 2016 11:01
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If this will be on a long term basis, a regular deposit such as monthly salary then another option would be to look at opening a local account (Japan) with an international bank such as HSBC as well as your home account (USA?). They offer internet banking services which allow the instant transfer of funds from one international account to another, think along the lines of moving funds from your current (checking for the USA I guess?) and savings. There are no charges for processing the payment but the exchange rate offered is where the bank make their money - a percent or two off the spot afaik. How this compares to the exclusive FX dealers I'm not sure.
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Sep 25, 2016 19:33
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D.Ork Bimboolean posted:I work frequently with money transfers and generally they will either be expensive or complicated or both depending on the amount, country, money service and your ability to juggle and document the money for tax purposes. Best options are Paypal, Western Union and MoneyGram. Reminder: Don't send money to ISIS.
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Sep 26, 2016 03:32
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and33 posted:If this will be on a long term basis, a regular deposit such as monthly salary then another option would be to look at opening a local account (Japan) with an international bank such as HSBC as well as your home account (USA?). I would like to have done this, but HSBC left Japan apparently? Any other International banks that operate out of Japan that you've dealt with?
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Oct 3, 2016 06:00
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| # ? May 6, 2024 09:20 |
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My european girlfriend paid me with Transferwise while we were traveling. I paid for everything and she sent me money from her european account to my schwab bank account. There are limits (20,000 SEK, or about $2400 usd) at a time, but the fee for a big $2000 usd transfer was something like $8. The concept is that they have accounts in all the major countries in the world. They take your money in one country, then use their account in the receiving country to send you money. So they only have 'internal' transfer fees and it comes out to very little for you.
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Oct 4, 2016 12:42
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