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What are the different ways to send or pay money to people in the Philippines? In this short episode, Nate Woodbury shares with us several different ways to do so. He also weighs the pros and cons of each option according to his experience. If you have virtual assistants, check this out!
How do you send money to the Philippines? It’s on the other side of the globe. If you hire people there, how do you send them money? I’ve got 14 full-time employees there, and I’ve gone through several different ways of paying them. I’m going to tell you that story and tell you what I use now. The first service that I used, and I believe the company’s still around today – but it doesn’t work for sending payments for business purposes. And this service is called zoom. It worked really well, but they shut me down once they found out that I was paying employees. So then, I switched to PayPal. Now, PayPal is great. I’ve been using it for many years. I’ve tried to find other options along the way just because the exchange rate isn’t as good as it could be. And sometimes, there are delays even as much as two weeks before my team actually receives those funds. And that’s really irritating. I think the main reason for that is because I pay 14 people in the Philippines through PayPal plus my to filming assistants through PayPal. That’s a lot of money going through PayPal. And so, they’re taking a lot longer to verify. At least that’s my guess. So, I’m kind of in an interesting place where I’m exploring some new options. There’s a service that has been around for a while called Payoneer. When I told my team that we were going to give it a try, a lot of them came back and said, “You know what? We get charged a lot of fees if we want to pull money out of an ATM. There’s delays. There’s a fee for this.” You have to pay an annual fee for them to be able to have an account on their end. So, they weren’t really excited about the fees and the difficulties. Now, if you go through the website that I use to find and hire people in the Philippines, it’s the virtualassistanttool.com, I’ll link to that below. Virtual assistant tool. They have a payment system called EasyPay. Now, EasyPay uses Payoneer. And according to my friend John who owns this tool, they’ve worked out all the bugs and gotten rid of the fees. So, I’m actually going to do a test and find out if they fixed all these problems. But I also want to tell you about Remitly. Remitly is a tool that my team came back to me and said, “Hey, Nate. We should try this one. It sounds like the exchange rate is better. The time for them to receive the funds is quicker, and they don’t have to deal with the hassle of any fees. So, I’m going to try this one as well. So before I skip ahead to the future, let me just say PayPal is a great tool when you send it to friends or family. You do have to pay a $5 fee to transfer the funds from U.S. dollars to Filipino pesos. That’s kind of high. So, every person I pay, I pay five bucks plus their salary. And right now, the biggest challenge for me is some of my team isn’t getting their money for 1 to 2 weeks after I make that payment. So, I’m either going to need to keep a larger balance within my PayPal account and then transfer from there. That’s one experiment I’m going to try. I’m also going to try Remitly. And I’m also going to try Payoneer through easy pay.