How Do I Send My Pension To The Philippines Each Month?

[Mr Lee]

Just to let you guys know since Art mentioned above that they all charge, there is no foreign transaction fee on the Capital One Venture Rewards Card but they do charge a yearly fee after the first year, but they also give you 2% back on purchases to be used towards paying airfare or hotel bills, and then there is the free Capital One Venture One rewards Card which I use and that has no yearly fee but only gives you back 1.25% in rewards and also has no foreign transaction fees. So deals are out there to be had but we have to hunt a lot more for them nowadays than in the past, and yes the banks are all screwing us but there is not much we can do except learn all the tricks we can to not let them screw us whenever possible, and that is what this forum is all about, helping each other find the easy and most cost effective ways to do things and with the least hassles while doing them. Anyone else have some good tips? Keep them coming because we all need to learn.

Edited December 31, 2010 by Mr. Lee
repair my spelling of bank name

[Mr Lee]

Next I will add that Capital One online Checking ATM give interest on their account ( at time of this post it says 1.01%) and also claims to charge no fees anywhere in the world and will even reimburse fees up to $10 a month that other banks charge you for using their machines. Free is out there to be had, at least for now.

• What is an Interest Online Checking Account?
• Free Online Checking that earns like savings
• No fees and no minimum balance requirement
• Access to more than a million ATMs worldwideWe don't charge ATM fees at more than a million ATMs worldwide. If another bank charges you, we refund up to $10 per month.
• Free Online Bill Pay with SmartSwitch
• FDIC insured to at least $250,000 per depositor

Edited December 31, 2010 by Mr. Lee
repair my spelling of bank name

[Art2ro]

Lee,Wow! You hit a nerve or a bitter sour note with me when you mentioned Capitol One! I've done business with Capital One years ago when I was still in the U.S. working and they surely didn't impress me with their services back in those days! Anytime I wanted to contact their customer service via the telephone in the U.S. or from abroad, they would pass me on from one rep onto the next and putting me hold forever and still not accomplishing anything as to the reason I called them in the first place! And emailing them on-line was even worst, you can't ask anything on-line of any of your personal account, they want you to do it in writing and mail it to them! And it took me months close to a year just to close out my account with them! They even screwed me over in not returning me my money what was left in the account by giving me the run around in trying to claim it in writing them a dozen times to no avail and I even reported them to the Better Business Bureau and with the U.S. Trade Commission! There's other horror stories about Capital One on the internet by other previous Capital One members over the the previous years with mortgage, life ins, car loans etc with Capitol One even before the recession came to be! So, good luck with Capitol One and beware! It may not happen to you, but it sure did happen to me and many others!

[Dave Hounddriver]

So, good luck with Capitol One and beware! It may not happen to you, but it sure did happen to me and many others!

As long as we are telling Capitol One stories, let me share my experience. They gave me easy credit, back when I was young and foolish. When I got divorced I was pressured to go bankrupt and I did. That meant I screwed over Capitol One, (among many others), for $10,000. Interestingly enough, when I got discharged they were the first company to offer me a decent credit card to help me get back on my feet. Sure they are all business but I was thankful for that attitude at the time.

[Art2ro]

Yeah, my plan didn't pan out concerning on-line money transfer from my U.S. bank account to my Philippine dollar bank account, because one can only use the system if one has a U.S. cellphone number where my U.S. bank will send me an SMS password codes to authenticate my requested on-line transfer transactions!

I didn't realize that you need an SMS password for on-line transfer transactions. I will visit my local Wells Fargo bank and verify this. They advertise a direct affiliation with BPI (Bank of Philippine Islands) with a transaction fee of 5-7 bucks. My understanding is all I need to do is to provide positive ID for a new dollar account at the nearest BPI branch in southern CA(West Covina, CA). Jake

Jake, With your Wells Fargo bank linked to BPI on-line will be great when you guys ever make it to the Philippines as long as the $5 to $7 service fee is a flat rate fee at any amount with the use of a simple password to authorize the transfer from your U.S. account to your USD account in the Philippines with BPI, not like with Bank of America which requires the use of a U.S. based cellphone to receive SMS text random access codes to authenticate the transaction on-line for that particular day or transaction on-line and plus the fact that it costs a one time fee of $20 to activate that particular on-line overseas transfer feature! So now you see my predicament and why I don't do it that with my U.S. on-line home banking system? So, If you can make unlimited money transfers on-line to your overseas account at will without any restrictions and don't mind the $5 to $7 flat rate fee per every transaction, then you have it made of all of your banking needs while residing in the Philippines for your convenience! There are still a lot of people trying to figure out how to transfer money to the Philippines and I believe this is the perfect solution for you and anyone else IMHO! I'll just make do as to how I'm doing it now, because it would be hard for me now to change my ways of banking, but it works for us for now and we haven't yet to pay any service fees what so ever! So that's our free banking system in the Philippines "My Way"! Artthe otherFil/Am Laki ako sa gatas..............ng Nanay ko! Edited December 31, 2010 by Fil/AmArt

[Jake]

Yeah, my plan didn't pan out concerning on-line money transfer from my U.S. bank account to my Philippine dollar bank account, because one can only use the system if one has a U.S. cellphone number where my U.S. bank will send me an SMS password codes to authenticate my requested on-line transfer transactions!

I didn't realize that you need an SMS password for on-line transfer transactions. I will visit my local Wells Fargo bank and verify this. They advertise a direct affiliation with BPI (Bank of Philippine Islands) with a transaction fee of 5-7 bucks. My understanding is all I need to do is to provide positive ID for a new dollar account at the nearest BPI branch in southern CA(West Covina, CA). Jake

Jake, With your Wells Fargo bank linked to BPI on-line will be great when you guys ever make it to the Philippines as long as the $5 to $7 service fee is a flat rate fee at any amount with the use of a simple password to authorize the transfer from your U.S. account to your USD account in the Philippines with BPI, not like with Bank of America which requires the use of a U.S. based cellphone to receive SMS text random access codes to authenticate the transaction on-line for that particular day or transaction on-line and plus the fact that it costs a one time fee of $20 to activate that particular on-line overseas transfer feature! So now you see my predicament and why I don't do it that with my U.S. on-line home banking system? So, If you can make unlimited money transfers on-line to your overseas account at will without any restrictions and don't mind the $5 to $7 flat rate fee per every transaction, then you have it made of all of your banking needs while residing in the Philippines for your convenience! There are still a lot of people trying to figure out how to transfer money to the Philippines and I believe this is the perfect solution for you and anyone else IMHO! I'll just make do as to how I'm doing it now, because it would be hard for me now to change my ways of banking, but it works for us for now and we haven't yet to pay any service fees what so ever! So that's our free banking system in the Philippines "My Way"! Artthe otherFil/Am Laki ako sa gatas..............ng Nanay ko!

Hey Pare,Just one more thing about B of A -- they suck big time! Although I have not set up my dollar account yet, the cute brunette atWells Fargo said it could all be done by a few strokes on the keyboard. Probably be changing my password every quarteranyway to keep everybody honest on both side of the ocean. The link below provides more information:https://www.wellsfar...remittance/asiaRespectfully -- the other DOM Fil/Am

[Art2ro]

Jake,The problem is what you are talking about is "money remittances" to your beneficiaries only in the Philippines similar to www.xoom.com where you can not send money to yourself in your own name or that of your wife who's name is on your joint account due to the Anti-Money Laundrying Act in the Philippines which prevents that, been there and tried it with no success, unless someone else sends me the money which defeats the purpose of what I'm getting at! You name it and I've done a lot of exhausting searches in how to send money to the Philippines to my account or to other people without being gouged with high service fees like $40 to transfer $3,000! No thank you, I'll just stick with my "free banking system" I've been using for the past 12 yrs here in the Philippines! I'm not kuripot, just being practical! You'll just have to check with Wells Fargo on that if it applys to them and your account! It's not the same as your regular on-line money transfer from account to account, but I'm not certain of that because I haven't been able to do it myself from the Philippines from day one! Remittances and personal on-line money transfers are two different types of transactions! You may have better luck with Wells Fargo, but then again I don't really know if that will be the case! Good luck! Been there, done all that long ago! This old re(tired) dog has learned many tricks over the years in a foreign land which I now call home! Dahil nga, lumaki ako sa gastas..........ng Nanay ko! Translation: because, I grew up on my......... mother's milk!

Edited December 31, 2010 by Fil/AmArt

[Mr Lee]

Lee,Wow! You hit a nerve or a bitter sour note with me when you mentioned Capitol One! I've done business with Capital One years ago when I was still in the U.S. working and they surely didn't impress me with their services back in those days! Anytime I wanted to contact their customer service via the telephone in the U.S. or from abroad, they would pass me on from one rep onto the next and putting me hold forever and still not accomplishing anything as to the reason I called them in the first place! And emailing them on-line was even worst, you can't ask anything on-line of any of your personal account, they want you to do it in writing and mail it to them! And it took me months close to a year just to close out my account with them! They even screwed me over in not returning me my money what was left in the account by giving me the run around in trying to claim it in writing them a dozen times to no avail and I even reported them to the Better Business Bureau and with the U.S. Trade Commission! There's other horror stories about Capital One on the internet by other previous Capital One members over the the previous years with mortgage, life ins, car loans etc with Capitol One even before the recession came to be! So, good luck with Capitol One and beware! It may not happen to you, but it sure did happen to me and many others!

Thank you Art for giving us your experience with Capital One but nowadays with the Internet, things have changed a lot. I have one of my 401k retirement CD's with them as well as a Money Market and now will open a checking account with them in order to get the ATM card that I can use fee free while out of the country. I have found that all banks are a pain to do business with nowadays, yet when online and signed into Capital One, and I send them a message asking them to change some things for me such as move interest from my CD to my other account, it gets done within a day and they have always been responsive on the phone or while signed in, so to each his own and what works for one does not always work for the other and in this new age of the Internet, there is not much that cannot be done online. As for horror stories, we have a Citibank account in the US and in the PHL and it is as if they are two very different banks, and it still takes us 21 days for one of their own checks to clear and become available when I check online and the check clears my US account within 3 days, and on top of that they now charge a 3% exchange rate when I use my US Citibank ATM card in their PHL Citibank, so time for me to move on to a new bank and probably in both places. Oh and they will not give me dollars when I use my US ATM card at their PHL bank even though they have machines which will give their PHL customers dollars from their PHL dollar account, so they are basically forcing the exchange rate on us when they could just give me dollars instead. BTW, I have been doing business with Capital One for over 7 years now and to date they have been very responsive to any calls or emails when sent while logged in. My guess is that all banks get millions of emails a day and the ones they get while logged in tell them that they are from their customers and they do respond to those fairly quickly, at least for me and I am sure I am nothing special to them. I also agree that up to now the best way is the way you do it with checks and that is what we also do, but having the Capital One ATM card may come in handy in emergencies and that is why I am getting one, to test it out and report back to members, and for that one just in case time that could happen such as when air travel was closed down in the US due to 9/11 and US people all over the world got stuck where they were and could not return to the US. I have found it is always best to have more than one route in anything I do and the Wells Fargo route may be another good one for me to eventually set up too when I do away with my Citibank accounts or just use it for pay pal.