Recently PayPal India started reversing all personal payments and after few days started reversing the withdrawal process. And since few days some popular blogs and news websites are showing that similar boring news with no information on this. Some blogs also added some email messages to their blog to make that look good. Recently PayPal blog updated with some information and this gives bit relaxation. Here I will not talk stupid, will provide you some info and some tricks to save money by using alternate services to PayPal.
I was tensed due to this problem in PayPal, but my behavior was cool and I was keep saying myself “All iz well”. People say “don’t use PayPal to as a saving account”. And it’s true that you will not get interest by saving money their. Today I found that the money I withdrawn from my PayPal account to my bank account reversed. Still I was cool, and I did not notice that I received less money than the actual amount. But when I see that I said something like “Fucking Paypal” (Update: they added that money, which was missing now to my account, peace). This happened because PayPal takes around 2.5% of the money as their currency conversion fees. They don’t show you that as fees, but their conversion rate is less than the actual conversion rates (conversion rates, exchange rates, forex – all same). Which is the conversion rate after deducting their fees from the original conversion rates. You can see I have written the eye opener on the header. This is because this activities by PayPal has opened my eyes (and mind too). I knew that PayPal rate is always less than the current conversion rate, but never thought why. And today I found this answer.
With this frustration level, I stopped working on my job and started looking for alternatives to PayPal. I found some good alternatives (this is an eye opener), which I will explain below. But after spending some quality hours on that, I emailed PayPal stating my frustration. I was not expecting any reply, but I got a very good reply. They assured that the money I lost during their reversal process will be added to my account in 24 – 72 hours. Earlier they informed in their blog that withdrawal facility to bank accounts will works in few days. And they also informed (in mail) that while we can’t withdraw money to our bank accounts, we can withdraw money to any Visa credit card or by check. So this is something good to hear from them.
PayPal Alternatives
Xoom
Xoom service is available from months and they claim that they are cheapest way to send money to India. And we all agree to this, but it’s cheaper than the withdrawal from PayPal to your bank account. Using Xoom, you can transfer money to three options:
- Cash Pickup from a Punjab National Bank
- Bank Deposit, supports any bank
- Home Delivery, using Blue Dart
Let me show you how you can save money with Xoom. This will very by very little amount as per the current conversion rates. For example, you want to withdraw $500 from your PayPal to your bank account. You will get INR 22,512.75. (PayPal exchange rate:1 USD = 45.0255 INR, at the time I am writing this). If you will use Xoom, you need to pay $19.99 as fee. Let’s reduce that from your $500. Now you can transfer $480 from your PayPal account to your bank account using Xoom. Here you will get INR 22,041.69 (Exchange Rate USD 1.00 = INR 45.9202 at time time I am writing this). This gives you more less money than PayPal normal withdrawal. But if you increase the amount to withdraw, then using Xoom will be profitable. But this time currency conversion rate of PayPal is too good and exchange rate of Xoom is too bad then PayPal wins the race upto maximum limit. In the morning when I was roughly estimating advantages by guessing normal exchange rate, then I Xoom was the winner. Since then I see a drop in the exchange rate of Xoom. And I see a good exchange rate at PayPal which is unbelievable.
I will tell you other eye opening advantages of Xoom later on this post. Also I will update you once I see Xoom wining the race. But before you transfer your money, you can compare both. It’ll be easy, if you know how much (max) money you want to withdraw.
Image credit: Fickr – stuartpilbrow – 089/365 Money…What Money
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