Back in 2014 when I started trying to make money online the only payment processor I was using for receiving money was Paypal, and I was receiving payments in US Dollars. But since I didn’t live in the US and I could only withdraw the money in Euros, I would convert my USD into EUR on Paypal. Then when I would accumulate an amount I was happy with, I would withdraw it to my bank account.
A Mistake!
In retrospect this was a mistake, because Paypal gives worse conversion rates than any bank would. Paypal makes money this way by ripping off their customers, and people never know about this unless they’re aware of it, but that’s a story for another day. The much better move would have been to withdraw US Dollars to my bank account, and allow my bank to convert the money into Euros. And this is still true to this day, February 2022.
Thankfully, I found out about the proper way to do things before I started making real money, so on the whole I didn’t lose too much money by doing currency conversion on Paypal. You live and learn.
Unnecessary!
One other thing that I used to do back in the day was write down unnecessary things and save unnecessary screenshots. One of those was saving a screenshot every time I would do a currency conversion on Paypal. Frankly, I don’t even remember the logic behind doing this. The one thing that it allowed me to do after a while was to go back and easily check the conversions I was doing and see exactly how the rates fluctuated over time.
Of course, I could just get a USD/EUR currency conversion chart online and see it like that, but with the screenshots it was easier, and it was more precise. Because remember, the rates I was getting on Paypal were lower than the actual rates on the market at any given time.
Below I’m sharing all of the screenshots along with the dates when they were taken. I’m doing this for a bit of closure on this very unnecessary activity that I was doing, and I figure some of you guys may find it interesting to just go through 100+ screenshots of USD/EUR Paypal currency conversions and see how the amounts change over a period of 4 years.
Screenshots
Below are all of the screenshots, over 100 of them, each preceded by the date when it was taken:
11-09-2014
19-09-2014
12-10-2014
22-10-2014
29-10-2014
07-11-2014
15-11-2014
21-12-2014
24-12-2014
30-12-2014
02-01-2015
13-01-2015
24-01-2015
01-02-2015
02-02-2015
19-02-2015
23-02-2015
27-02-2015
03-03-2015
03-09-2015
03-13-2015
03-16-2015
03-21-2015
03-27-2015
03-31-2015
04-10-2015
04-18-2015
04-27-2015
05-2-2015
05-31-2015
06-16-2015
06-29-2015
08-08-2015
09-05-2015
09-09-2015
09-28-2015
10-14-2015
10-31-2015
11-25-2015
12-02-2015
12-13-2015
12-17-2015
12-29-2015
12-30-2015
01-01-2016
01-05-2016
01-07-2016
01-08-2016
01-18-2016
01-22-2016
01-23-2016
01-24-2016
01-27-2016
01-30-2016
02-16-2016
02-19-2016
02-22-2016
02-27-2016
03-01-2016
04-23-2016
05-13-2016
05-15-2016
05-19-2016
05-25-2016
05-28-2016
05-30-2016
09-20-2016
09-21-2016
10-22-2016
10-29-2016
12-25-2016
12-29-2016
01-02-2017
01-09-2017
01-18-2017
01-26-2017
01-27-2017
01-29-2017
01-31-2017
01-31-2017
02-01-2017
02-07-2017
02-08-2017
02-11-2017
02-14-2017
02-21-2017
02-23-2017
02-25-2017
02-27-2017
02-27-2017
03-07-2017
03-09-2017
03-29-2017
03-30-2017
03-31-2017
04-01-2017
04-06-2017
04-20-2017
10-16-2017
10-27-2017
11-08-2017
12-09-2017
12-13-2017
05-09-2018
05-11-2018
05-21-2018
05-25-2018
05-31-2018
06-19-2018
06-29-2018
This rate is our wholesale cost of foreign currency plus a currency conversion fee. This fee depends on the currency you are converting into. See the “Fees” > “Additional Fees” > “Currency Conversion Fee” section of the User Agreement for details.
Here is a video I made talking about this:
Conclusion
The conclusion here is that sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we do unnecessary things, but as long as we learn from it and keep moving forward, good things can happen.
Like I said above, we live and learn 🙂