Of course. I agree, and I do my utmost to avoid these things. Compounding matters.
My point is that sometimes people end up sounding like they are only getting profits from their dividends.
As a Canadian I am used to getting taxed on both capital gains and dividends. So I guess I don’t see it as that big a deal. There are some tax provisions in Canada that allow for some tax breaks, but non-Canadian company dividends are fully taxed, often times above 30% (based on your overall income). So I suppose I just see the 30% as the cost of doing business with a US company.
Has anybody tried opening a Wise account, topping it up via debit card and then linking the Wise account to IBKR and finally transferring from the Wise account to the IBKR account?
Topping up Wise account with a Taiwan debit card seems to be around USD 16.
Topping up IBKR by linking it with a Wise account seems to be around USD 3-4.
idk if this would be a relatively cheaper option or if it’s not that big of a difference.
Do you mean topping up a wise account with a Taiwan debit card? That seems like a bad idea because the debit card has a withdrawal limit, so you’d have to pay the transaction fee every time you withdraw.
Another option is convert to crypto stablecoins via a local exchange such as Maicoin or Bitopro, which have little to no fees, then transfer to a regulated crypto exchange that can offramp at a US bank (such as coinbase). You can use L2 which have very little transaction fees, like $0.01 for the transfer. The USDT/TWD rate is always super high, I think people are trying to convert to crypto? For example it’s 32.278 for USDT/TWD at Bitopro (幣託 BitoPro - 台幣買賣比特幣、以太幣的加密貨幣交易所) and the real time rate for USD/TWD is 31.9710. Hua nan bank spot rate to buy is 31.92. So you’d earn an additional 1.1% on your money by going this route vs. using a local bank.
Edit: never mind my math sucks it’s the other way around for crypto. Price is bad since too many buying USDT.
Or just wire a large amount of USD at a time from your local Taiwan bank. The ~30 USD fixed transfer fee would only be a small percentage.
You may want to be careful here. It is not easy to transfer money from Wise to IB. I have successfully done this several times long ago but it became gradually more difficult to the point where I stopped trying. It seems like IB discourage the use of Wise. Their support basically told me it is not possible to transfer through them, but after that I still managed to get it done, but it was a mess.
Well according to their website they have Wise as a method for funding the account. Could it be that they have fixed the issue you were having? It’s either that or the usual Bank Wire as none of the other methods given for clients based in Taiwan seem viable to me.
I have not tried sending funds to Wise from Taiwan, but I have sent funds from Wise to IBKR. When sending from Wise to IBKR there is no fee (at least not the last 3 times I have done this), and the transfer is almost instant.
Linking your Wise account also has the advantage that you can move funds from IBKR back to your wise account as required, again without fees (?), so great to use for online purchases or debit card on your phone wallet
Wise now charges a (small) fee regardless of how you make the transfer. I got charged a few Euros for moving a few thousand EURs a few weeks back. Again, it isn’t a massive fee, but it seems to be mandatory now (again I suggest for you to double check, maybe my case was special)
Of course - learning by doing is also a good idea.
but learning some of the ‘theory’ isn’t too bad either - up to you though (you can try some of Rob Berger’s videos on youtube- he’s pretty thorough and charismatic).
Cathay charges me 300, I don’t think I’m charged anything on the US side as long as I maintain a certain balance. I wonder if IBKR has a similar fee waiver?