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How to Time PayPal Withdrawals to Get the Best Currency Exchange Rate

Last updated: June 03, 202134 Comments

This is a post for all those of you who don’t have a US-based bank account but work online and receive payments via PayPal.

At some point, you will want to transfer your PayPal funds to your local bank account so you can withdraw and use your hard-earned money.

However, you could be making a fundamental mistake during the process of withdrawal. Actually, I’ve been doing it myself for many years. I felt really dumb when I realized.

By the way, did you know that you can now buy Bitcoin and cryptos with your PayPal account on Coinbase and eToro? Read my guide to buying crypto with PayPal to find out how.

As you know, exchange rates are always fluctuating, so your aim is to get the best deal when transferring money from PayPal to your bank account.

Let’s say we want to transfer US dollars to Euro, which is what I do every so often. What I do nowadays is to first check the exchange rate, and also historical rates via this website. That gives me an idea if today is a good day to make the transfer or not. Looking back at the historical rates of the past 3 months, I then decide on a target rate I want to aim for. At present my target rate is 1 USD = 0.78 EUR.

Historical exchange rates

With that figure in mind, I then head over to XE and set up email alerts. Now as soon as the exchange rate climbs to 0.78 I will immediately get an email and that’s when I will make my withdrawal from my PayPal account to my local bank account.

When2Convert Currency converter and email alerts

Setting up email alerts for my desired conversion rate

When2convert is an excellent service in my opinion, because it automates the whole thing and makes it very easy for me. Before I used to check the exchange rates every couple of days (every day is just too tedious), and sometimes I used to miss a good day. So I knew I need an automated shortcut of doing this checking. Luckily I found this site, and I hope you find it useful too.

Update: I found a similar tool (also free) at https://www.specificfeeds.com/Free-Forex-Signal-and-Exchange-Rate-Tracker and there you can not only define strike prices, but you can select to get updated every time the EUR/USD rate changes by 0.02 points or so, so that it’s not a one-time notification, but you always know if there have been significant changes without spending too much time to checking it every couple of days.

Another option is to just withdraw every month on a specific day, and in this way you eliminate the hassle of trying to time the forex market to your benefit. You might lose out sometimes, but it might be more important for you to have money coming in on a regular basis, so you have to factor in the pros and cons.

Do you have any other related tips you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments section below!

Note: If you have any questions after reading this and the several other articles relating to PayPal on this site, please leave a comment or contact PayPal directly. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I am unable to offer any advice over email so all emails related to PayPal will remain unanswered.

This is post 1 of 17 in the series “PayPal”

The Shocking Truth about Online Airline Ticket Prices

Last updated: October 16, 20183 Comments

As you search for the cheapest air ticket to your next travel destination, did you ever wonder what dark forces are at work behind your browser window?

Apparently, airlines sometimes use some shady tactics while delivering the price of a ticket to you, as indicated in a thread I came across recently on Reddit.

Basically what happens is that airlines will try collect as much data about you as possible, sometimes through the use of a cookie stored on your computer, and sometimes just from your IP address.

If using the IP address method, they can serve different prices depending on your location. The logic in this is of course that in general, a person accessing the site from the US is more likely to have a higher disposable income than another accessing the site from India. I’ve personally seen this happen when comparing ticket prices with friends overseas while we chatted on Skype. The prices given to us (in the same currency) were indeed different.

With the cookie method, a website can track how many times you’ve checked a particular trip, if they see that you are checking frequently for the same flight, they might start hiking up the price by a few dollars each time, instilling a sense of urgency in you, and thus being in a better position to make you buy the tickets. I guess most of us know that bad feeling when you see a cheap ticket and make up your mind to buy it, only to go back again in a few days ready to purchase, and find out it’s now double the price or more.

This isn’t something that is guaranteed to always happen, but it’s a good idea to take precautions against such manipulations by not allowing cookies when searching for tickets. The easiest way to do this is to open an incognito window in Firefox or in Chrome. These windows won’t store any cookies so the airlines can’t play their nasty tricks on you. Clearing your cookies before a browsing session won’t hurt either.

Have you encountered such practices yourself?

When to Buy

Everyone knows a last-minute plane ticket is probably expensive, but how far in advance do you need to purchase a ticket is a little less known.

According to a study by Cheapair.com, the best window of time to purchase a ticket in 2017 was 70 days in advance, a bit higher than the sweet spot in 2016 which was 54 days. However, that 70 was an average. The “best” time to buy actually depends on the season when you plan to travel.

In winter you want to try for 62 days in advance, spring 90 days in advance, summer 47 days in advance, and fall 69 days in advance, on average. And as for that theory that there’s a best day of the week to buy—CheapAir says that’s not really true. Airfare during the week traditionally doesn’t fluctuate more than $2 from day to day, so you’re fine buying a ticket any day you want.

When it comes to when you fly, there is a difference. The cheapest days to fly are Tuesday and Wednesday, while Sunday is the most expensive.

Earn Money Online From Video Tutorials

Last updated: October 16, 201810 Comments

There are loads of ways you can make money online. The moment you start taking things seriously, and believing that you can indeed earn your living from online ventures, many doors will open in front of you.

A very good opportunity I’ve found is that of earning money online by creating video tutorials. Virtually anyone has expertise about something, and there are probably many people out there who would like to learn about that topic which you know inside out.

Here are some websites which act as online video training marketplaces. On these websites you can create courses and sell them. The websites will typically take a commission and you will get the rest of the cash.

Udemy

Udemy is one of my favourite video tutorial marketplaces. It is very well designed and there are already authors who have racked up some massive sales numbers. It has been around since 2010 and has experienced very strong growth.
It gives a lot of freedom to the content creators, giving you the ability to release free or paid courses, and the ability to choose exactly what your course will be about. If you are charging for the course you keep 70% of the income from the course, and if you are promoting your own course via affiliate links, you can get 85% of the full price of the course.

What’s the benefit of joining Udemy as a trainer? You get a full marketing platform behind you, plus the infrastructure to not only show videos, but also have a question and answer facility and much more. It’s very hard for anyone to build up the features of such a platform for your yourself. The most popular tutorials are those in the technology and business niches, with top authors earning 5 or 6 figures a year with their videos.

Check out the video below to learn a bit more about Udemy.

Visit Udemy

Tutsplus Marketplace

The Tutsplus marketplace was created by marketplace giants Envato of Themeforest and Codecanyon fame.

The nice thing about this marketplace is that you can create and sell very niche tutorials, so you don’t have to commit to create a long course that would take you lots of time to complete. It’s a nice place to test the waters and see if creating online video tutorials is a thing for you.

Visit Tutsplus Marketplace

Learnable

Learnable is another marketplace that competes with Udemy, it is however focused on web design and development courses, so its more limited as a money making resource.

Visit Learnable

Udemy is, in my opinion, the most modern and open marketplace from all these, so I would recommend that you use it as your starting point. There’s a great earning potential on Udemy if you deliver the right course with the right content.

If you already own a blog and have a good number of followers, it will be easier for you to promote your course and make money.

Lately I’ve been doing quite a number of video reviews of WordPress plugins, and with each video I record I try to improve my technique. Here are some really nice tutorials and guides I’ve found along the way.

Tips from Chris McQueen at TechSmith
SuchaVoice – Voice over training and demo production

Do you have any other favourite resources? Let me know in the comments section.

Malta, a Top Digital Nomad Destination

Last updated: July 01, 202138 Comments

Update 2021: This article was originally written in 2012, and some things have changed since then. I’m leaving this post online as a record of my thoughts back then, but please do further research if you’re interested in Malta as a digital nomad destination. One positive development has been the launch of the digital nomad visa. Whether this is successful long-term is anyone’s guess, but you should definitely have a look if you’re a non-EU citizen.

When embarking on the journey to become a digital nomad, one of the first things we search for is a great place to relocate to. Deciding to become a digital nomad is, often, a direct consequence of a wish to travel and discover the world, and get a break from your familiar surroundings.

As working as a digital nomad becomes more fashionable, we can see a certain list of countries establishing themselves as ideal locations, due to various factors.

Here are some of the cities/countries most cited by bloggers and digital nomads:

Chiang Mai – Thailand
Berlin – Germany
Buenos Aires – Argentina
Medellin – Colombia
Davao City – Philippines
Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam
Barcelona – Spain

The clear trend is that of moving to places which give you better value for money and an immersion into a new culture. You will seldom find cities in the US or Europe mentioned as ideal choices for a location independent lifestyle, largely because they are too expensive, or they are not deemed to be exotic enough.

Today I am going to bring you one more destination, a place which has been largely overlooked by digital nomads and location independent workers. I strongly believe that Malta is an almost perfect location and has been a well-guarded secret for far too long.

[Read more…]

When to Buy

Udemy

Tutsplus Marketplace

Learnable

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