Jean Galea

  • Home
  • Start Here
  • About
  • Podcast
  • Padel
  • Guest Posting
  • Contact

Tips to Follow When Buying Products and Services in Foreign Currencies

Published Feb 02, 2017 2 Comments

Whenever you are abroad and the country where you’re at has a different currency than your home currency, you will need to keep a few things in mind. The same applies when you’re buying online from a website that shows its prices in a different currency than your home country.

To give some practical examples, if you’re from a Eurozone country and you are shopping in the UK, the advice below will apply to you. The same holds true if you’re a Eurozone resident and are buying products from a UK-based website such as Amazon.co.uk.

  • Your local bank will use its own exchange rates and charge you a currency conversion fee for every transaction (purchase) you make. Avoid such charges and get better rates by using the Revolut card. Revolut will give you the real exchange rate with no surprise fees when you spend or send money globally.
  • Always pay in local currency whenever the choice is given. Many business owners and ATMs participate in a practice called DCC, Dynamic Currency Conversion. With this (anti-)service, the payable amount is being converted to the card’s currency. This usually comes at a premium of 4-5 percent. Advocates of DCC argue, that this is an extra service, so the cardholder would know the final price in their familiar currency.

Notes on using Revolut abroad

Sometimes when you use an ATM abroad, you will be asked to choose between a ‘credit’, ‘checking’ or ‘savings’ account. You should always choose either a ‘checking’ or ‘savings’ account.

If the ATM (or card terminal) asks whether you would like to complete the transaction ‘with conversion’ or ‘without conversion’, you should ALWAYS choose ‘without conversion‘.

As a rule of thumb, you should always opt to be charged in the local currency of the country you’re in! If you’re in Thailand choose Thai Baht, in Spain, Euros or in the United States, Dollars.

If you choose ‘with conversion’, the merchant or ATM provider can apply their own exchange rate. This rate usually has a mark-up on the interbank rate, enabling the ATM provider or merchant to make a profit on your transaction.

ATM withdrawals are free up to £200 (or currency equivalent) per calendar month. A 2% fee applies thereafter.

Currency conversion is done at live interbank rate with no fees up to £5000 (or currency equivalent) per calendar month. A 0.5% fee applies thereafter. At the weekend (Friday 00:00 – Sunday 23:59) Revolut applies a small mark up on the spot rate as the Forex markets are closed. They take the rate from Friday 00:00 and apply a 0.5% mark up on major currencies and 1.0% on other currencies to protect the company from potential losses due to a large fluctuation in the rate. For illiquid currencies like Russian Ruble and Thai Baht, there is 1.5% mark up on weekend.

Do you have any other tips to share? Let us know in the comments section below.

How To Send and Receive Faxes for Free Without a Fax Machine

Published Jan 25, 2017 3 Comments

Send free faxes online

Fax machines must be one of the most loathed gadgets ever invented, however, they are still in use by many corporations and governments.

If you have been asked to send a fax to someone and you don’t have a fax machine at home or in your office, worry not, I have a great solution for you.

Sending Faxes for Free

  1. Head over to HelloFax and sign up (email address and password, or via your Google/Facebook accounts)
  2. Have the documents ready on your computer, then upload them to the HelloFax site via their easy upload system. You can even upload files from Dropbox, Evernote, Box or Google Drive.
  3. Enter the fax number of the recipient and hit send. That’s it!

With the free plan, you can send up to 5 free faxes per month. If you need to regularly send and receive faxes (yes, you can also receive faxes, they get sent to your email account), you can purchase a monthly subscription for just $9.99. That will give you up to 300 pages per month.

Of course, there is also a 30 day no strings attached trial.

For occasional use, I’ve just stuck to the free plan which works swimmingly well and has solved the fax problem for me going forward.

Send a free fax with HelloFax

Another great option for sending faxes, just in case you need to send more pages than the ones HelloFax gives you for free, is Fax.Plus.

Receiving Faxes for Free

The free plan at HelloFax does not allow you to receive faxes for free. Instead, I use FaxBurner, a similar service that also allows you to receive and send faxes for free. The sending of faxes with FaxBurner is limited to USA and Canada, so I prefer HelloFax for sending.

To receive faxes with FaxBurner all you need to do is sign up for a free account, then create a free number using the interface. You are then able to receive faxes on that temporary number.

Send a free fax with FaxBurner

Where to Buy Used Items in Spain

Updated Sep 08, 2018 (first published Jan 2017) 2 Comments

Looking to save some money and buy second-hand items in Spain? These are the top sites to check out:

  • Wallapop.com
  • Mitrastero.org
  • Vibbo.com
  • Casinuevo.net
  • Tablondeanuncios.net
  • Ebay.es
  • Anuncios.es
  • Re-read.com
  • Todocoleccion.net
  • Coches.net

Have I missed out on your favourite second hand items site? Let me know in the comments section.

Building Resilience

Published Jan 19, 2017 2 Comments

resilience

During a recent session of meditation I came across this insightful quote by the 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva:

Where could I possibly find enough leather to cover the surface of the thorny earth?

Yet leather on the soles of my shoes is as good as covering the entire earth.

Likewise it is not possible for me to restrain the external course of things.

But if could I restrain this mind of mine why would I need to restrain all else?

Too many times we get angry and distressed at what’s happening around us. To be sure, we are never going to be short of things to pick on in this crazy world that we live in.

Shantideva tells us that it is hopeless to try and control the many aggravations of our daily lives. Yet is it possible to change our way of experiencing life instead?

Of course it is! Life is a subjective experience. As I think about this quote, I remember my 93 year old grandmother, who maintains an incredibly positive and cheerful state whatever comes her way.

She’s lived through the Second World War and the early death of her husband amongst many other hardships, but I can’t recall a single time when I found her in an angry, stressed or depressed state.

Unfortunately I haven’t inherited her natural gift of defaulting to having a positive outlook on the world around us, but I know through experience that I can continuously retrain the mind to achieve the same state.

Daily meditation is an essential tool for this purpose. It builds awareness and helps increase our resilience to the challenges and obstacles that we encounter.

Meditation helps remind me of the impermanence of things; the natural ebb and flow of life. It’s a great way to culture feelings of forgiveness, love, and kindness toward the world and fellow humans.

If you have never meditated or have not made it a daily practice, I highly encourage you to do so. For help in getting started, you can check out my favorite meditation app: Calm.

How to take iPhone and iPad Backups

Updated Mar 19, 2018 (first published Jan 2017) Leave a Comment

iCloud

I have already written about my backup strategy; it isn’t anything innovative and follows the well-known 3-2-1 backup system. In today’s post, I’d like to spend some more time to talk about backing up iOS devices.

The iPhone indeed warrants special consideration in my backup strategy. The reason is that it is the smallest device I have and the one that I carry around the most. Hence the likelihood of it getting lost or stolen is much higher compared to the other devices. This also means that I want to make sure everything is backed up in real-time or close enough to that. The aim is that if the iPhone gets dropped and destroyed, lost, or stolen, I can just get another one, restore the backup and continue my life without any big drama. I won’t be happy about it, but at least it won’t make me lose a bunch of time or rue the disappearance of precious photos and videos taken with the iPhone.

[Read more…]

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • …
  • 55
  • Next Page »

Jean Galea

Online Entrepreneur. Global Citizen. Padel Player.
Founder of WP Mayor & WP RSS Aggregator.

Follow @jeangalea

Search

Social

  • Email
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Instagram

Load More...Follow on Instagram

Latest Padel Match

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Success

My Latest Investment

  • Impossible List
  • Affiliate Disclaimer
  • Search
  • Cookies
  • Contact

Copyright © 2019 · Hosted at Kinsta · Built on the Genesis Framework