Withdrawing money with Upwork-a. Comparative analysis
On the Internet, there are many references to cashing out hard earned money with Upwork-a, and the freelance platform itself does not hide it, but the exact amount of the commission that you have to pay for each option is not specified anywhere. Therefore, for the interest, it was decided to withdraw a certain amount at once by all possible means and compare the results.
The article describes the "legal" options for cashing out, without the creation of foreign firms and accounts.
Upwork itself offers to transfer money immediately to a Russian bank account, to Paypal, to Payoneer, the WireTransfer option and to an account in a US bank.
The last option as the most trivial does not interest us.
When withdrawing directly to an account in a Russian bank, there too, but through Paypal, as well as WireTransfer, you need to take into account sanctions - it may not be possible to withdraw to Sberbank, RSHB and some other banks. Failure in this case, you get immediately at the input BIK-a or SWIFT-a. We need to look for an unauthorized bank - some regional one will do the job.
With WireTransfer, it also turned out to be an ambush. A long call about a dozen financial institutions with a question about opening a currency account for some reason caught managers off guard. Similarly, by the way, these people by phone could not clearly answer whether their bank is on the sanction list and whether they accept money transfers in foreign currency from the United States.
Unexpectedly, MTS-Bank was found, who agreed to open an account in dollars, although nothing was said about this service on their website. They also agreed to open a currency account in one local bank, however they immediately warned about the transfer fee (1%) and about the “currency control” service.
It was not possible to find out what kind of a beast it was and how it works - they explained that it was a kind of a result of currency prostitutes and currency fartsovschiki from the 80s of the last century. As a result, it was decided to sacrifice the completeness of the experiment for the sake of smaller hemorrhoids, and to refuse to test the services of WireTransfer, especially since its advantage is manifested only with amounts from several thousand dollars.
So, directly from Upworka, through Paypal and Payoneer, $ 200 were sent to ruble accounts in Russian banks. Payoneer on a large sanctions bank, the other two on the local. Paypal reached in three days, the rest - in two. A simple algorithm was used to calculate the commission - the withdrawn amount was converted into rubles at the time of withdrawal at the official exchange rate of the Central Bank, then it looked how much of this eventually fell into the account, and the net formula was considered net based on the gross. It is in the table.
| Upwork - RuBank | Paypal | Payoneer |
| $ 1 + 9.7% | $ 2 + 2.4% | $ 2 + 1.7% |
In all cases, the commission is formed from the internal currency conversion rate of the translator.
Considering that with bank transfers within Russia you often pay from 2%, Payonner shows wonders. And this applies only to transfer to a debit account in a bank, “cashing” through Payoneer MasterCard was not considered. From the “advantages” of the system, it can also be noted that Payoneer allows you to receive a payment from any natural or legal person with a very small percentage.
There was also an informal conversation with the bank's operating officer about the problem-free receipt of foreign tranches. He explained that the tax authorities are leaving information on transactions over 600 tr. not their sum. That is, receiving several small payments is much more fraught with respect to the questions that arise for you than one big one. But these questions, again, relate to the provisions of the above law, and not "pay taxes, live peacefully."