Oluniyi David Ajao

Whether you are an affiliate (a member of a multi-level marketing scheme [MLM]), an online forex or hyip investor, or you run an online store or make make money online somewhat, you need to get paid. There are several ways of getting paid but which one you choose will depend on your country of residence, and then what’s more convenient for you.

Cheque: Good old paper cheque. This is the worst way of getting paid online even if you live in the same country as the company behind the website you’re dealing with. First there are currency issues, then postage, and then deposit into your bank account.

If you an affiliate, chances are your parent MLM company is US-based and they issue cheques denominated in US Dollars. If you’re based outside the western world, hard-luck. First, you need to wait for a few weeks for your cheque to be prepared and mailed out. Regular mailing is probably free, but the cheque could take between 1 and 3 weeks to get to you or might never get to you at all because it can get stolen or “lost-in-transit”. Sending via services like DHL, UPS or Fedex could attract an additional fee of about $30 but you’d get the cheque in about a week.

So you got the cheque? Now what? You need to deposit it into your bank account. Your local bank would usually require that you have a US dollar denominated account to be able to deposit such cheques and you need to wait for between 3 and 6 weeks for the cheque to clear! What your bank actually does is to send the cheque back to the USA and clear it through their corresponding bank. This takes time.

Now wait for the worst part: your bank will charge you a fee, for clearing the cheque. Depending on your country, this could be anywhere between $15 and $50! (I’ve had a bank charge me $50 to clear a cheque with a face value of $75 here in Ghana before).

Way out?
A way out of this is to open a US checking account (that’s what current accounts are called in the US & Canada) but then the cheque has to come to you first for endorsement and then you need to mail it back to the USA. Your US bank is not likely to charge you any fee for clearing the cheque. The major hurdle is how to open the US bank account. Since 9/11 terrorist attack, the USA Patriot Act requires that all financial institutions obtain, verify and keep the identity information of any individual or organization that opens a new US bank account.

Opening a US Bank Account
Now, most of the banks require the Social Security Number (SSN) of account applicants, as well as Passport, state ID or driver’s license. The SSN angle makes it virtually impossible for a non-US resident but a few banks accommodate none-US residents, through very stringent means.

In my opinion, paper cheques should be scrapped as a means of making payments less than $1,000 for all the reasons I have stated above. There are other means of receiving payments online. I’d deal with these in the 2nd part of this post.