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Payoneer wants to verify my identity in order to add a bank account. They think it makes sense to do that by asking for someone's birth date. Their software errors out because the account was auto-created for me and I never provided a birth date. It might be set to a placeholder.
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Google sends bug bounties via wire transfers to my USD bank account at a Canadian bank. That's not perfect since it burns money from wire transfers fees but it's a lot better than this. GitHub Sponsors uses Stripe which deposits directly via ACH since my bank has US ACH support.
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End result of Stripe using ACH is a lot nicer but it was a complete disaster getting it working. I went several months without getting money from GitHub Sponsors because Stripe had trouble dealing with sending USD to a Canadian bank instead of converting. Financial services suck.
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PayPal is a similar mess. PayPal doesn't want to allow Canadians to withdraw USD. They want you to convert and pay their 2.5% fee. I figured out I could enter the Royal Bank of Canada's virtual US branch information and they think it's an American bank and let me withdraw...
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Replying to and
I can't easily spend USD another way right now beyond RBC Direct Investing or a wire transfer. They offer a USD credit card but it has an annual fee which rules it out. Seems the RBC US branch offers a no fee USD credit card to Canadians but there are likely fees for US branch.
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Replying to and
Canadians can't get credit cards with comparable cash back as Americans which is also annoying. Currently mostly get 1% cash back via no fee card, although I could get up to around 2% if I paid a fee, and I spend enough that extra cash back would cover fee, but annoying to swap.
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