Filipinos who reside in foreign countries often find themselves needing to send money to their family in the Philippines. I’m sure you’re familiar with wire transfers, walk-in money transfer centers, online payment and other traditional ways to send money remittance – but are you getting the best deal possible?
On this post, I’ll be sharing how you can get smarter and save money on remittance transfer fees.
Do Comparison Shopping
It never hurts to shop around and compare the best money transfer rates. The rates and costs associated with transferring money can vary wildly from one provider to the next. There are free, third party tools to find the best rates. After all, you always deserve to get the best rate for your dollar. One site you can visit is https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org. This website provides data on the cost of sending and receiving small amounts of money from one country to another.
Avoid Sending Too Often
Many OFWs live in paycheck to paycheck and they are oblige to send money every month if not every week. By limiting the number of times you send money, you reduce the amount of fees you have to pay for. You can avoid extra transfer fees entirely by including more money each time and reducing the number of times you send overall. Also, by sending larger amounts of money can also make you save in fees.
Decide How Quickly It Needs To Get There
Don’t pay extra to get the money there in a few hours if a day or several days will do. Money transfers often take a few days for the money to hit the destination. But, if speed is paramount, a few companies offer instant cash transfers to thousands of locations anywhere in the world but they aren’t necessarily cheap.
Send Dollars to Dollars
It’s sometimes less costly to send in dollars and have the recipient convert the money to the local currency. Ask your recipient to check out the conversion rate being used by local companies. However, if you prefer to send it directly to a private bank account, just be aware of exchange conversion fees. This is the fee that will be generated for every dollar you send.
Open Multiple Online Bank Accounts
If you prefer to send money directly to a bank account in the Philippines, I would recommend opening at least two bank accounts and enroll these accounts to online banking. Open one account for yourself and the other one for your family. To save on bank transfer fees, send money to your own savings account in the Philippines and just transfer a certain balance to your family’s bank account and then the beneficiary can withdraw it anytime after.
Do you know any other cost efficient ways of sending money back to the Philippines?
photo credit: $-) via photopin (license)
Often I notice that Filipinos prefer to go to remittance center then they also end up buying more stuff. (Which I’m also do sometimes.) I prefer to send money in the Philippines through mobile apps.
Since then I save a lot of money; I pay $1 – $2 on PayPal. I also use my time on more important things than going to the center. Take note that time is more valuable than money since there’s no way to earn it again unlike money.
Takeaway: use your time wisely and learn how to send money online.