What are Alternatives to PayPal?

The First in a Series. Also You Can Get $100!

I have been doing a lot of financial housecleaning and budgeting in the past several days. You can always see what you value when you start writing down exactly where money is going to each month. Apparently I hands down like to pay banks a lot of money in interest charges and processing fees. This is going to have to change.

I am aware that Substack takes out a cut on my subscription fees, but I am less concerned about that as this has been the first platform where I have gained any meaningful audience. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to interact with like minded people both in Thailand and from all over the world and appreciate all of your support. It has been lifesaving for me to not feel crazy and isolated as I did for most of the year of infamy of 2021. I am very dedicated to the cause of making sure that the unprecedented loss of civil liberties never happens again.

My last donation on ko-fi by Citizen Doctor was literally used to buy coffee, along with eggs, noodles, cooking oil, cereal, bread, cheese and milk.

My ko-fi donations have recently fallen to nothing, which is not surprising as it is most commonly linked to PayPal. Much like GoFundMe before it freezing people’s accounts has a chilling effect on free speech. It should also be punished.

This article by Dr. Mercola explains very well what is happening:

“PayPal Is Stealing Funds Adding insult to injury, PayPal is also seizing any money you might have in your account on the day of deplatforming. As reported by independent journalist Matt Taibbi in May 2022: “In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress ... Consortium editor Joe Lauria succeeded in reaching a human being at the company in search of details about the frozen or ‘held’ funds referenced in the note. The PayPal rep told him that if the company decided ‘there was a violation’ after a half-year review period, then ‘it is possible’ PayPal would keep the $9,348.14 remaining in Consortium’s account, as ‘damages.’ ‘A secretive process in which they could award themselves damages, not by a judge or a jury,’ Lauria says. ‘Totally in secret’ ... This episode ups the ante again on the content moderation movement ... where having the wrong opinions can result in your money being frozen or seized. Going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect.” PayPal’s Terms of Service: $2,500 Fine for Misinformation 2 3,4 5 6 7 8 9 On top of its deplatforming of political opponents and freezing their funds, PayPal recently threatened to fine users who express opinions that the company doesn’t agree with. In other words, they’ve devised yet another way of stealing your funds, even if they don’t seize your entire account and close it down. As reported by the DailyWire November 7, 2022: “A new policy update from PayPal will permit the firm to sanction users who advance purported ‘misinformation’ or present risks to user ‘wellbeing’ with fines of up to $2,500 per offense. The financial services company, which has repeatedly deplatformed organizations and individual commentators for their political views, will expand its ‘existing list of prohibited activities’ on November 3. Among the changes are prohibitions on ‘the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials’ that ‘promote misinformation’ or ‘present a risk to user safety or wellbeing.’ Users are also barred from ‘the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory.’” According to the notice, the determination of what could be deemed “misinformation” was to be at the sole discretion of PayPal, and the fine was to be “debited directly from your PayPal account.” It’s worth noting that undefined “misinformation” wasn’t the only thing that could incur a fine; item (i) of the policy also included materials “otherwise unfit for publication.” Unfit? What could that be? Your guess is as good as mine. Based on whom they’ve deplatformed and seized funds from so far, people who would see thousands of dollars swiped from their PayPal accounts as fines for wrongthink would include anyone who doesn’t care for global tyranny, censorship, government overreach, forced medical interventions, nuclear war, The Great Reset or pedophile grooming of children, just to name a few.

Don't forget to take out the trash this weekend

I do not use PayPal very much, so abandoning the platform altogether would be largely symbolic for me. I do receive a few donations from my ko-fi link, though those were always small and have tailed off in recent weeks. I am looking into changing payment processors to stripe on that one.

Ko-fi claims that it takes out no fees on donations. That may be true but then PayPal certainly does. A $3 ko-fi tip credits to $2.11 in my PayPal account. Somebody who generously gave me a $21 tip amounted to $18.31 on my side. So PayPal takes a 30% cut on small tips and a 13% cut on slightly larger ones.

I’ve been recently back on Buy Me a Coffee, which offers much broader payment options (accepting PayPal along with major credit cards), even though they do take out a fee. I did a quick parody to Hotel California on there just to test out the audio. That one processes through Stripe and two people have generously bought me 5 coffees each for $25. That totaled to $22.16 each time on my end, equaling an 11.36% cut taken out. So buy me a coffee is clearly beating out ko-fi.

I did a web search of the differences between ko-fi and buy me a coffee and noticed few of them talked about financial processing, anonymity, or what types of payments were accepted. This is silly because those things would be top of mind to potential donors. Here's some things that I know are important there:

1. Accepts multiple payment options. Apple and Google pay, credit cards, PayPal, Stripe, UnionPay , the more the merrier.

2. Accepts donations/views without signing into the website. I know several people who will not bother with anything that requires a sign in or a sign up.

3. Allows potential anonymous donations. I would guess that a majority of people who have donated want to take credit for it, but not all. After GoFundMe froze the accounts of supporters of Canadian trucker protests, I’d guess that number is rising.

On all of the issues above, Buy me a Coffee beats out ko-fi hands down.

For the creator low processing fees and speed to bank account WITHOUT MINIMUMS are very important. My guess is most creators do pretty low volume business as I do, though I greatly appreciate all tips and feedback. Certain websites won’t pay creators until they’ve reached $100, say, which can take months and months on a low volume site. I’ve been giving away a few free subscriptions to my paid newsletters in cases where I can track down the email address for donors on either ko-fi or Buy me a Coffee. For now I am going to try to switch ko-fi over to Stripe and not go too crazy over the 19 euro cents that is currently in my PayPal account. I feel terrible for content creators who are doing high volume through these sites and thus feel trapped in them. The potential for financial ruin is what they have really been holding over everyone as the real threat. Get out of there as soon as you can.

This article is running a bit long, but I want to do a financial house cleaning regarding my status as an unbanked person in Thailand (that has to do with evil Obama era legislation called FATCA) SWIFT, how I got scammed on a crypto “investment opportunity” last year, why you should get your books off of Amazon and into smaller publishing houses or true self publishing, alternatives to Youtube for content creators, and why traditional large banks like Bank of America are evil. Mostly they all lulled people into a system which is ultimately a trap. It’s going to take a lot of work to rebuild.

I am all ears regarding PayPal, banking, crypto and payment processing alternatives. I have a CashApp at $AmySukwan (if you provide me an email address I can message you an invite code where I get $5 and you get $5 for signing into the app) that I have had good results with.

In Thailand I use US based Chime Bank, and here is a referral link where I get $100 and you do too for opening a new account and funding it with direct deposit by December 31, 2022. They have no foreign transaction fees and no ATM fees in the USA if money is withdrawn from a 7 Eleven. It used to be free for me to withdraw money in Thailand too but they’ve sadly raised it to a $2.50 cash transaction fee on that. I’ve had no complaint thus far except that a lot of “traditional” US banks do not want to work with them, so moving money around is difficult. Some things are blocked because I am in Thailand but as a US citizen a lot of alternatives will not accept me. Thanks FATCA.

So what are you using? And does anyone want to give me a tutorial on crypto that doesn’t involve a scam?