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 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.
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.
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.
Do you have any other related tips you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments section below!
I noticed that neither of the sites mentioned in the article are working today.
So today I found this tool on the site of Transferwise. I also offers email alerts.
https://transferwise.com/tools/exchange-rate-alerts/
Let’s see if it works in the coming weeks.
Could any one tell me how my russian friend can send me money…i live in india and my friend is from russia. He is confused how can he ll convert money into indian currency through paypal. We both dont know about this app. I just made a account.
hello!
im searching in google if is possible change the balance of my paypal in usd to EUR im spanish and sell in dollars but nothing only can do that with the conversion of paypal to buy if possible choose different conversion but to sell not…
maybe im confuse but do you know that info?
thanks!!
Great post, I was wondering why my balance is kept in USD even though i’m in Euro zone.
Thanks. Works for me (in Australia) 🙂
Still the same “Question” Is there any alternate to the Pay pal for India.(While receiving payments from Canada)
I’ve heard people mention Payoneer for cases like yours, but I’m not an expert on that.
Hi, thanks for your article – its a clever way to make sure you’re not getting ripped off.
I have a specific problem, and I was wondering if you or anyone else could help…
I receive payments from a foreign client in British pounds and usually convert to USD when accepting payment. Thereafter I withdraw the money to my South African bank account (which means another fee to convert it to South African rands). Should I rather keep the funds in the currency they were sent in? Does that mean no conversion is done until I choose to do so?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Lars
If you are using PayPal then yes I’d keep them in GBP and only convert them to South African rands when I want to.
Thank you for advice
Wow great tool! The problem I have is that the 3 month currency conversion ($ to £) looks to be at a high right now of .62 but paypal is only paying .60 today. So is the tool then useless if paypal doesn’t match the current exchange rate?
Read my other post about PayPal exchange rates, PayPal are usually not the best place to have your conversions happen, and I’ve found a way around that.
And that way around is?^^
Check out my latest update on this subject https://jeangalea.com/changing-paypal-withdrawal-currency/