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 ACH bank transfer to my UglyCash account ($2) -> Withdraw to Binance (+$2) -> sell in P2P
• 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". When I need pesos I sell dollars to my bank or take them to a currency exchange business (see Cuentas banco#Cambio de divisa)

An advantage of having savings in stable coins rather than dollars is that there are products that offer much better returns (>=8% APY) than what is available in my local market (~5%), however, they have a higher barrier of entry, I would never recommend or try to teach my mom what are liquidity pools and how to invest in them. (related: crypto#yield farming)

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 (>=10k USD)
• International ACH
  • Slow, cheaper than wire

Remittance services
At their core, they are just a category of money transfers differentiated by their purpose and the specific regulations and laws governing them.
These services are typically used by individuals sending money to family and friends in other countries, characterized by small, frequent transactions.
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 money transfer
  • 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.

Most offer a debit card. How they work is that when you make a purchase, the app instantly converts the necessary amount of stablecoins from your wallet into "real dollars.", and 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. A common approach stable coin 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 Bridge, 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 costs for exchanging stable coins and pesos.

stable coin apps comparison:
There is no perfect app for everyone, the best one for you depends mostly on your transactional profile.
I compared 10 apps in this google sheets document. If you see any wrong information or know any of the missing values in the table, send me a msg and I will update it.

practical comparison
Wise is the cheapest traditional alternative, so let's consider that one. In my case using Wise to send me USD to Dominican Republic, Wise charges my client 9.54 USD Swift fee plus their own fees which are like $6 more. When I receive the money, my bank charges me $7 "Incoming foreign transfer" fee and have to sell my bank the dollars at their bad exchange rate. If my client used Wise to send me DOP it would be even more expensive.

Compared with the stable coin app I'm currently using: my client does an ACH bank transfer to a US bank account (free) and I get charged a total of $4 to receive and withdraw that money to Binance where I can sell the USDT at a price that is always higher than local USD/DOP spot. I can probably lower this cost even more but the app I'm currently using gives me good yield on my balance

(also If I was 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)

Winners:

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

notes:

1. If you decide to sign up to UglyCash and use my referral code rulay you will unlock an extra 1% APY on your balance https://applink.ugly.cash/referral/rulay (please do your own research and diversify your investments)
2. 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

taxes

• Impuestos de contratista remoto en RD
• registering an LLC