It's the end of the year, time for gifts, presents, regalos, presentes, whatever. For that, you need money, and of course, lots of money gets exchanged around during this period of the year.
If you're lucky and you're dealing with someone from within your own borders or you're both from an economic block (such as the EU) then sending money to each other for whatever Christmas needs that may arise is simple enough.
Specially if both persons are in Brazil, since we have Pix, which is an absolutely incredible form of payment processor which lets you easily send and receive money from people and businesses - not to mention that it's state owned and compatible with literally every single bank in the country.
Unluckily, this is not my case. Well, I am Brazilian, but I'm trying to receive money from a family member in the UK. And ooooohhh boy.
It has not been pleasant.
What happened was, they suggested that I use PayPal, so I downloaded it, created an account and they sent me the money, and it's quite a good amount of money.
But then when I went to withdrawal it - PayPal simply says my account is limited and I need to give some info to use withdrawls and send money.
"Okay", I thought to myself, this is just like any other bank.
So I filled in all the forms and sent a picture of the document they said was required.
Now here's where it pissed me off:
There's a 2 to 4 day wait to confirm your documents.
A 2-4 day wait on something that I need pronto, right now, immediately, asap.
But I took a deep breath and thought "Ok. Let's wait."
Today, one day after that ordeal I receive an email, not saying it was confirmed but complaining about the document photo I sent. Saying they need the other side and that the photo was not clear enough - when it clearly was. EVERYTHING is readable.
And what's on the other side of that document? Nothing besides my signature... Is that really that important?
Anyways, I sent it again. Another photo this time, and a photo of the front of said document as well.
Now I'm waiting, and to top things off, they want me to link my bank account to my PayPal account. Something that should be simple, easy and FAST.
But again, they loooove bureaucracy and slowness, so it might take upwards of 3 FREAKING DAYS for them to send me the necessary information to link my bank account.
I'm incredibly pissed at how ineffective PayPal is. So much so that I filed a complaint on a Brazilian website where you can get in touch with companies by saying what's wrong. Problem is they can take up to 9 days to respond... Hopefully by then everything will be sorted out.
But there is something else I'm worried at, which is how long will it take for the money to go from PayPal to my bank. I've heard some places that it's instantaneous, but others have said it can take upwards of 2 days.
And to think all of this could have been avoided had:
- PayPal not being so slow
- PayPal not dropping support for the Pix payment method in Brazil
But well... Sigh... Anyways, guess I must wait. Hopefully everything will be ready before the 24th. There's plenty of time till then but they're so fucking slow that I wouldn't doubt things being stretched out till then.
Let's hope it goes well.