Goal

My goal is to find:

• The cheapest way to get paid by a client in the US (lowest fees)
• Convenient for the client (US Bank Account)
• Don't necessarily need the transfer to be as fast as possible

What I currently do:

• US bank transfer to my UglyCash account ($2) -> Withdraw to Binance (+$2) -> sell in P2P

  • (If I were a US citizen I could cut out UglyCash and ACH deposit to Coinbase (free onramp to USDC) -> Binance P2P. This would make international money transfer basically free)

• International bank deposit via Wise straight to my dollars account in local bank (my contractor uses Wise and pays them the sending fees). When I receive the money, my local bank charges me $7 (Incoming foreign transfer fee). Finally when I need pesos y sell them to the bank or take them to a currency exchange business (see Cuentas banco#Cambio de divisa)

A downside of using crypto is that my income may now look unjustified coming from random P2P transfers. Getting direct deposit by the same company every month looks like a regular salary.
I could just have all my savings in USD but an upside of having savings in stable coins is that there are products that offer much better returns (>=8% APY) than what is available in my local market (~5%). (related: crypto#yield farming and crypto#purchasing)

Options

From worst to best

• Paypal: too expensive, avoid
• Mercury, works like a real US bank account. Need an LLC in the US tho.

• disregard peer to peer payment apps because you must be US citizen to sign up.

traditional banking

• Wire Transfer.
  • fast and expensive. Effective for very large amounts of money
• International ACH
  • Slow, cheaper than wire

Remittance services
At the root they are also just money transfers but the difference is in the purpose (just a categoric difference or meaning) and the regulation and laws around them.
People sending money to family and friends, small and often.
These services focus on flexibility (cash pickup, bank deposit, wallet apps...) and speed. Tend to be more expensive than international money transfer services because they need to cover more costs.
Cash pickup (Even though I personally don't use it) is an important service because many people remain unbanked in latam.

The traditional remittance services have existing large physical agent networks but are now digitalized as well

• Western Union
• Moneygram

Digital remittance service
Since these are digital first, they have less cost and less fees than traditional remittance services, but still more expensive than Wise.

• Remitly
• Xoom (by paypal)

International Money Transfer Services (also called Money Service Businesses or Foreign Exchange Providers)

• Wise
  • focus on getting best exchange rate with a transparent fee structure - instead of using traditional wire transfers they use alternative more cost effective networks like ACH to move the money to the destination country and use the local bank system to make the final deposit.
  • In their origins used to be a P2P platform for money transfers but switched to their current more regulated business model (and more expensive for the customer).
  • To transfer money to DR it costs like 1% of the total amount
• Deel
  • Aimed more towards business owners. Deel handles the payments and all the compliance/legal stuff for companies to hire remote contractors.
  • As a contractor for a company that uses Deel's services you are technically a Deel employee (but in practice this doesn't really matter)

• Payoneer:
  • Receiving payments from companies

Stable coin apps

The way most of these apps work is they open a bank account at your name in the US and any money deposited to the account is automatically exchanged (on-ramped) into a stable coin and sent to digital wallet/app.

Some offer a debit card. The way this works is that when you make a purchase, the app instantly converts the necessary amount of stablecoins from your wallet into "real dollars." (this conversion is very low cost, basically free and instant). It then uses a partner bank or financial institution to pay the merchant through the traditional card network.

The process is basically the same for transfers: the fiat on and off ramping basically depend on the partnerships these apps make with local entities that can handle fiat currency. These can be banks, payment processors and Money Service Businesses (MSBs). A common approach StableCoin apps take is instead of having to manually find, negotiate and integrate with entities everywhere in the world, they partner with a global on/off ramp providers like Moonpay or Banxa which have already done the hard work.

Taking one of the apps Pana as an example, they use Moonpay to onramp debit card deposits and _ for withdraws. Recently they announced a partnership with Asociación Popular (founders are dominican) which should lower their withdraw (offramp) costs a significant amount in the Dominican Republic.

apps:
There is no perfect app for everyone, the best one for you depends mostly on your transactional profile.

Winners:

• UglyCash for great yield
• Wallbit and Sling for 0 fee transfers (haven't tried them)

To do:

• Add a "daily / monthly transfer limit" for apps that limit the amount of money you can receive and withdraw.

Impuestos

• Impuestos de contratista remoto en RD
• registering an LLC

notes:

1. Please do your own research and diversify your investments
2. If you decide to sign up to uglycash and use my referral code rulay you will unlock extra yield on your balance https://applink.ugly.cash/referral/rulay (read point 1)
3. Pricing on these apps will most certainly change throughout time so if you see any outdated or wrong information, pls send me a message and I'll try to update it