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Living in Barcelona – An Honest Review

Last updated: April 14, 20225 Comments

After spending several years traveling as a digital nomad in search of an ideal place to settle in, our choice fell on Barcelona.

I think it’s one of the best destinations in Europe for online entrepreneurs, lifestyle designers and freelancers. The closest alternative I’ve found is Lisbon, and I’ve compared the two in my Lisbon vs Barcelona article. In a nutshell, Barcelona is the better place lifestyle-wise, but Lisbon wins on the taxation front due to its NHR programme and lack of tax on crypto. It would also probably be fair to say that if you’ve already made your money and want to be around investors and well-off families, Cascais (seaside town close to Lisbon) is the better option for you.

This is a subjective post as every person/family has their own needs and requirements from a place; Barcelona just happens to fit mine very well. Here’s why. I will list both positives and negatives. People tend to criticize me for looking negatively at countries or cultures, but I only try to be realistic.

I choose to live in a city/country not because everything there is perfect, but because the good things outweigh the bad ones by a very significant margin. This ratio can change over time so I do evaluate my thoughts every few years, keeping into consideration the alternatives available.

Although I do my best to integrate wherever I am, that doesn’t mean that I’ll adopt the negative aspects of that culture, nor do I stop wishing that those aspects would change over time.

With that in mind, I’ll be going through all the best and worst things about Barcelona.

The Good

Sport is in Barcelona’s DNA

Barcelona is a city where sport is held in very high regard. You can easily practice any kind of group sports, and there are great locations for individual sports too. Do you love running? You have the hills and mountains all to yourself, not to mention the seaside promenade. Beach volley, check. Football, check. Cycling, awesome. Padel, of course! Swimming? At many gyms all year round or in the sea. The list never ends. The only problem I have is deciding what sport to practice!

A big chunk of Barcelona owes its origins to the Barcelona Olympic games in 1992, and today one can still feel that ambiance pervade the city. There are many gyms to choose from at all price ranges, with many of them having an indoor pool. The topology of the city also presents natural invitations to practice sport. There are some awesome hills and mountains to climb if you’re into cycling, or you can head to the beaches for a swim or try your hand at SUP.

When I arrived in Barcelona I also fell in love with padel, and this city, along with Madrid, is the top place to be for any padel amateur or pro player.

One can also find several apps designed to help people access many gyms and sports facilities for one monthly price, which is very convenient.

I don’t need to mention that Barcelona is home to one of the most famous football clubs in the world, Barcelona FC.

[Read more…]

Filed under: Expat life

Accepting Credit Card Payments via Braintree in Europe

Last updated: March 15, 20223 Comments

Update August 2020: I now prefer Stripe over 2Checkout or Braintree. After moving to Stripe I saw a drastic reduction in abandoned carts (from 10% to 1.46%) and a corresponding rise in revenue.

Update Mar 2019: The pricing for Braintree is now cheaper, they charge 1.9% and 2.9% instead of the 2.9% and 3.9% mentioned below, which is a significant difference. I’ll probably try them again at some point soon.

Update June 2018: I have now switched to 2Checkout instead of Braintree. Unfortunately, I had a negative experience with Braintree. They decided to ban our account after receiving just 2 refund requests from a 100 sales, which seems nonsensical to me.

Braintree_Logo_dark

This week I’ve been implementing BrainTree card payments for our WordPress plugin WP RSS Aggregator. We had several reasons for making this move. Here’s a few of them:

  • Some people didn’t have money in their PayPal account and it took 3 days to make the transfer from their debit card to PayPal, hence it was much more likely that they would look for another plugin that can be bought via a debit card rather than wait out the 3 days.
  • PayPal payments cannot be done from all countries in the world. We’ve had potential clients from Pakistan and other countries in that region who had no way of paying us since they cannot use PayPal.
  • Others just don’t like PayPal and prefer using the traditional way of purchasing by entering their debit/credit card information directly on our site rather than create a PayPal account.

Why BrainTree?

Initially I wanted to go with Stripe, however they are not available yet in Malta, so I had to find an alternative solution. Braintree fit the bill perfectly. On September 26, 2013 Braintree was acquired by PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, in a deal worth $800 million. Since we’re already using PayPal successfully, it also made sense to use Braintree.

The process was relatively painless. After a few to and fro emails to get us approved into the BrainTree system, I completed the implementation on the site in less than an hour. Since we are using Easy Digital Downloads as our e-commerce platform, I just had to buy the EDD Braintree add-on, fill in a few fields and activate everything.

Some Important Things to Note

  • You can also take PayPal transactions through Braintree. They will cost whatever they cost through PayPal.
  • With PayPal whenever you give a full or partial refund, PayPal refunds their commission to you too (excluding the fixed fee which they keep). In Braintree’s case, whether you issue a full refund, or a partial refund, they keep all the fees they originally collected on that transaction. So if you give out full or partial refunds on a frequent basis, you have to be careful with Braintree.

European pricing for Braintree is 2,9% + €,30 per transaction. There are no monthly fees, and you only pay for what you use — there’s no minimum transaction processing amount.The only fee you might see is if you incur any chargebacks (i.e. a customer disputes a charge). In that case you will be charged €15 for each chargeback incident. With PayPal there are no chargeback fees.

Braintree does not charge foreign exchange fees and European card transactions are not charged cross-border fees. Transactions on cards issued outside of these European countries will be billed at 3.9%. That is in addition to the standard €,30 fixed fee per transaction.

Now lets take a look at European PayPal fees (cross-border, taking a common example where most buyers are in the US and the seller is in the EU):

Transaction Fees Europe Cross Border Payments PayPal

Here’s a practical example. If your product retails at $15.00 and a US customer bought a copy you will see this in your PayPal account:

Total amount: $15.00 USD
Fee amount: -$0.78 USD
Net amount: $14.22 USD

Now the price per transaction varies as per the table above, but lets assume that your shop is clearing more than 10,000 EUR but less than 50,000 EUR per month, meaning that it will fall in the category of 3.2% + $0.30 USD.

3.2% of $15.00 = $0.48

Then lets add the $0.30 and we get $0.48 + $0.30 – $0.78 USD in total fees from PayPal. You take home $14.22 USD.

So for many vendors, I suspect that Braintree will work out cheaper, as their fee is the equivalent of PayPal’s 50,000+ EUR tier which is hard to reach for small businesses and individual freelancers.

All funds processed through Braintree are settled in daily batches (Monday-Friday) and are automatically sent to your business bank account within 48 hours. For European businesses Braintree require that this bank account is a European bank account.

You are able to choose the funds you would like to charge your customers in and receive funds in. If you would like to have a USD set-up and settle funds into your bank account in USD Braintree can do this without conversion. If you would like funds to be in EUR they can do this as well! It is more or less up to you how you would like it set-up.

Reconciliation Process for Braintree

An important thing you or your accountant will be doing at least every month is a full reconciliation of the transactions that have gone through Braintree and the debits and credits to your associated bank account.

The best way to reconcile your debits and deposits is to look at the Settlement Batch Summary and your monthly statement. The Settlement Batch Summary will show the net settlement for that day. This amount, minus fees, will be deposited or debited from your bank account, however fee totals are not available in the gateway.

For merchants on flat rate pricing, fees can be easily calculated using the Settlement Batch Summary totals. Merchants on interchange pricing models can view their fees on their monthly statement. The monthly statement will show the total aggregate fees for that month and the amount funded to your bank account. A statement guide is available here.

I’ll keep updating this post with more insights as I go along.

Update: 25/12/14

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve started using Braintree on my site and the results have been good. Here is some insight on these first few purchases that have gone through.

Visa card payments are exactly double those from Mastercard. These are the two cards I can accept at the moment through Braintree.

Around 40% of payments are now coming through Braintree and the rest come through Paypal. Before introducing Braintree all my transactions were processed by Paypal. This change has not brought about an increase in total sales yet, but I will have to revisit this at a later stage since December is traditionally a slow month. January and February should give us a better indication on whether introducing credit card payments actually boosted sales or not (which was mostly the whole point of introducing this facility).

  1. How to Time PayPal Withdrawals to Get the Best Currency Exchange Rate
  2. 🧐 Are You Losing out from PayPal’s Exchange Rates?
  3. 🤔 Which PayPal Account is Best for You?
  4. 💸 Changing Your PayPal Withdrawal Currency
  5. Accepting Credit Card Payments via Braintree in Europe
  6. Braintree vs PayPal Fees, Which One is Cheaper?
  7. 💸 Understanding PayPal Cross Border Fees
  8. PayPal Now Allows Withdrawing Money to Bank Accounts in Malta
  9. 💳 Withdrawing Money From PayPal for Non-US Accounts
  10. Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?
  11. 🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?
  12. 🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless
  13. 💳 Linking Virtual Bank Accounts and Cards to PayPal (Revolut, Wise etc)
  14. How to Check the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) History in PayPal
  15. PayPal Stiffs Sellers With Changes in Refund Policy
  16. How to Change Ownership of a PayPal Account
  17. How to Buy Bitcoin and Crypto With PayPal

Filed under: Business

The Simple Guide to Managing Your Email More Effectively

Last updated: September 08, 20184 Comments

Quick post today, here’s an awesome guide on how to manage your email inbox. I’ve been using it for a few months and it’s really boosted my productivity enormously. Try it out and take me later.

Filed under: Tech

Rechargeable vs Single Use Batteries

Last updated: August 13, 2020Leave a Comment

Today I’ve spent some time researching the topic of rechargeable vs single-use batteries. Mostly just for fun but also to see if I could save some money and use better products than I’ve used till now. I usually use rechargeable batteries at home for my electronic devices, and had a cheap charger that always seemed to do the job.

Most of what I’ve learnt today is neatly summarised in this PDF, however these are the main points:

  • The best choice of rechargeable batteries on the market is the Sanyo Eneloop brand, they lose very little charge over time
  • It’s important to have an intelligent charger to properly take care of your batteries, the best one is the AccuCell BC-700
  • Rechargeable batteries are better for the environment
  • Know where you should use rechargeable and where to use single use

Lets talk a bit more about that last point. Single use batteries are ideal for low-drain devices such as that clock on your wall, safety devices (best to change them yearly as part of a maintenance plan). For anything else (wireless keyboards/mice, cameras, flashes, bike lights etc.) it makes sense to use rechargeable batteries.

Filed under: Tech

Easily Delete Your Online Accounts with AccountKiller

Last updated: October 16, 2018Leave a Comment

how to easily delete your online accounts accountkiller.com

AccountKiller is an online service that makes it very easy to delete accounts that are no longer wanted. Some websites make it notoriously difficult to find the ‘Cancel account’ button, and in those cases AccountKiller is a time and sanity saver.

If a website does not allow you to cancel an account (surprisingly there are many famous one which do this), AccountKiller gives you tips on how to anonymize those accounts.

Filed under: Tech

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Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete.

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