[consulting] How do you receive payments?

[Evan Leibovitch]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> Yeah, that's not acceptable. What I do is to ask my US clients to pay
> through SWIFT. It usally takes some adjustments on their part (the US
> is IMNSHO a bit underprivileged when it comes to banking ;-) but so
> far nobody has declined to do that for me. What you need from your
> Italian bank is their SWIFT number and the number of their US
> intermediary bank.
>
> This is a lot cheaper than paypal, but I don't currently have any
> numbers. IIRC the cost is between 1 and 2%.
It's already been said here (and my experiences concur) that bank fees
to perform such wire transfers often seriously outweigh the percentages
that Paypal gets. If you are aware of a bank that charges only $2 for a
$100 wire transfer to Italy, I want to know the name of that bank.

One suggestion, if you're going to do a lot of international work: have
a business account in a bank with strong international presence (I've
used HSBC but Citibank is also good and there are others) and see what
they can do for you to allow you to accept foreign cheques. In Canada
you can get US-dollar bank accounts that can accept regular cheques
drawn on US banks. Cheques from smaller US banks take a while to clear,
though :-)

Also, don't forget Western Union...

- Evan