I’ve been a regular user of Xoom‘s services for more than three years already. I primarily used it to receive money from my offshore freelance and corporate web design clients, but ever since Paypal became fully functional here in the Philippines, I’ve been using it to send money from my Paypal account.

I already tried using Paypal’s withdrawal service. Albeit free of charge (transaction fee is free if it’s more than a certain amount), it took so long to reflect on my account that Marc and I even thought that the money was already floating in space or that some schmuck got lucky and spent our money. No schmuck got lucky (fortunately), but we received the deposit about one and a half months after I initiated the transaction from my Paypal account.

So what we do now to “withdraw” our money from Paypal is through Xoom. From our Paypal account (which is under my name), we send the money to our Xoom account (which is under Marc’s name). There’s a transaction fee to pay, but at least the money gets deposited straight to our BPI (Bank of the Philippine Islands) account in a day or two if we made the transaction during a business day. We never had problems with Xoom or Paypal, until last week, that is. Read more