I’ve recently inherited a windfall valued at roughly 3 million NTD or roughly 100,000 USD. What’s the best (and hopefully legal) way to transfer this money to Taiwan?
Anti Money Laundering Laws makes wire transfers very complicated, both from the country of origin of the funds and Taiwan itself. There needs to be a reason for the funds to be transferred. Since I live in Taiwan and hope to do so for the foreseeable future, I just want to be able to have the money in Taiwan, to invest or just spend in general. “Personal Use” isn’t a valid reason though.
SWIFT transfer. Tell the Taiwanese bank in advance that the money will come in. Be prepared to show proof of inheritance. Show proof of residency to overseas bank.
You may want to check whether you have to pay the Taiwan estate tax if you wire it into Taiwan. I’m not sure if it applies for overseas inheretence. But assuming you’re ok with the estate taxes, just wire personal to personal account shouldn’t raise much issues (name of account holder has to match). If names don’t match then there’s more questions on both ends
Usually, the bank will ask for the source of funds not for the reason of transfer. So specifying it’s from an inheritance should be fine. And definitely not illegal.
Not sure if you’re liable to any taxes in Taiwan in this case, though.
I think you can transfer 50k USD a year without issue, but that rule may have changed. If possible, open up an account that has presence in States and Taiwan like Citi. You can then transfer money over without any fees.
I’ve thought about doing something like this too but then news about Citi pulling out of Taiwan, and hearsay of HSBC not being a great bank in Taiwan makes me hesitant. I’ll look into this once I’m back in Taiwan. Thanks for the advice.
I would open an account in US while your there just in case you want to go that route. Also I think Citi in Taiwan was just narrowing down their service, not 100% moving out of Taiwan. But in any case, as long as there is a citi building in Taiwan that you can walk into to setup the account and an ATM that you can goto get your money, your all set.
Current crash/volatility is making me hesitant to go this route. 100,000 USD is not insignificant and I’m not comfortable buying that amount in crypto. Not to mention, from my research so far, selling crypto for NTD incurs income tax.
Can someone explain to me how that works? Supposedly USDC is pegged to the US dollar and fully reserved. If this is the case, why would anyone pay you 14% interest on it? Either people don’t trust the currency (USDC, not USD) or the funds are lent to borrowers with extremely high risk of default. Or both.
Unless the people behind USDC can mint as much of it as they want, in which case it isn’t really pegged to the USD.
The same reason people pay credit cards 28% interest rates. Since USDC is pegged to USD, a company could offer conventional loans and give you part of the interest rates back.
You can also get a defi wallet and do everything yourself to see how it works. You have to find projects willing to pay staking rewards. Crypto.com does that for you if you want to save time.
If you’re an American, you can use Voyager which is fdic insured, gives 9% rates on USDC
Because you can get much more than that for liquidity mining in DeFi projects. I was just looking at USDC-DFI mining which pays 66% per year net of fees. Chains that just launched can pay way more than that.
Obviously, it is not risk-free. US Treasury bonds are as low risk as they come. Ten-year rates are at 1.8%. Anything paying higher than that is compensating you for some type of additional risk. To say otherwise is naive.
