Going international

B and I are going to the States and Canada this summer.

Unfortunately it was a whole lot easier said than done!

The back story: my mom's family in Canada is organizing a big family reunion. B and I wanted to go and I was going to have the time off from the University, so we started looking at tickets.

And then we came back to Earth. Over a 1000€ per person! We can fly to San Diego in November for 600€ per person; summer flights are so over priced!

But my mom changed jobs with a pay raise and my parents offered to pay for the flights with some money they had put aside to help us travel to Asia since we haven't seen the family in Canada for a long time.

You could say that the easiest solution would have been for my parents to purchase the tickets for us, but that's neither here nor there. And Skype chats with screen sharing so I can help my parents do something make me want to pull my hair out.

First, my mom looked into how she could send me the money. We had previously used PayPal to send money internationally, so she logged into PayPal to see if she could add the credit union the money was in to her PayPal account. My mom wasn't able to do this, but I think it was more a "User error" (i.e. mistakes by my mom) than PayPal. She transferred the funds to a different bank account which was already connected to PayPal.

When she went to set up the payment of $5,000, she got a message that there would be $198 in fees. We wanted to use PayPal because the fees are low or inexistant, so I helped my mom figure out that she had her credit card selected as the source of the funds and not her checking account. Because of the large sum, PayPal automatically put a hold on the transfer, even though it was coming directly out of a checking account and there was about a 2 day delay before the funds were released. We did some experimenting on putting in amounts to see what the fees would be, and for $2,500 there were $12 in fees, but only $5 for sending $5,000, so my mom sent it all at once.

When I logged into PayPal to accept the transfer, I discovered that receiving such a large sum automatically blocked my account. I had to scan a photo ID and proof of address and send it to PayPal to prove my identity in accordance with European anti money-laundering laws. The procedure was actually well explained on the PayPal site and it was really easy to upload my photo ID and proof of address. It took 2 days I think for my account to be unblocked, at which point I could accept the payment (I chose to accept it in euros, so I received 3,883€. This is slightly less than the published exchange rate, but it's not bad). On the third day PayPal said the payment had been made, but it didn't show up in my bank account until the following day. From the time my mom clicked send to when I had the money in my account it took 4 days.

The story doesn't quite end there either. Once the money was in my account, B and I tried to buy our tickets. Each time the 2,800€ tickets were refused when we clicked on the purchase button. I called the contact number for the website, and the woman correctly suggested that it was probably a limit on my carte bleue (2,500€ in the past 30 days).

That being a Sunday, I had to wait to call my bank on Monday. The branch my account is managed by is closed on Mondays and open on Saturday mornings, so I could only have the central call center send a message to my conseillère. Tuesday I got a call about my request to increase the maximum amount I could spend with my card in 30 days. Of course the increase would only take affect 24 hours later. While I was on the phone, my conseillère said that she was required to ask about the origins of PayPal payments over 2,000€ (not 100% sure on the money amount). I didn't want her to start saying she was going to declare the transfer as foreign income to be taxed, etc etc, so I said the money was a reimbursement from my family. She didn't ask any more questions and seemed fine with my explanation, so I left it at that. When I had my "solde de tout comptes" for a previous job that was over 3,000€ in one check, my bank also called me to ask what it was for, so I think it had more to do with the fact that I'm not a high roller and rarely have large deposits like that, as opposed to real suspicion because I got money from PayPal. Since I had converted the money to euros within PayPal, the transfer appeared to be coming from Europe/France for my bank (but I swear I'm not laundering money!).

Today I could finally buy my plane tickets: I'm taking B to Canada, San Francisco, and Florida for the first time (in addition to San Diego to see my parents).

What did I learn from all this?
- Even though technology and the internet make it generally faster and easier to send money internationally, there are still delays and problems and you should always allow for those.
- There's a new company and that offers direct flights from San Diego to Calgary, which I think is pretty awesome.