In Thailand, live in America and Thailand, ... problems

[JETTABUG]

Hi. I have an issue. Being in Thailand and havng a nice, fat balance in the local currency in my account I made a debit purchase. Sure enough, PayPal took it out of my US$ balance instead. How can I change this but still make it so that when I request money from my bank account to be put in PayPal it is reqested of my bank in US$ so that my bank does not charge me large fee for currency conversion?

Cheers,

 - JETTABUG

[surplusdealdude]

Don't have a US$ balance.  Paypal will always take the available balance first as long as there is one.

[JETTABUG]

However, won't PayPal then request funds from my bank account in the foreign currency instead of us$? If so, my bank charges big fees. THe idea here is avoid the fees by taking funds from my US$ bank account, placing in PayPal, converting to Thai Baht, and using my PayPal debit card from an ATM or POS.

[surplusdealdude]

However, won't PayPal then request funds from my bank account in the foreign currency instead of us$? If so, my bank charges big fees.

Yes, they probably will request them.

Have you enabled your account to receive That baht?  It's in the "currency converter" link on the main page, up near where it says "balance".

You could try adding the baht and then transferring a small amount of money from your bank to your Paypal account in baht.

If that doesn't work ( confidence is not high), then I think you'd have to open a Thai Paypal account, upload the money into it from your bank, convert it and then use "Send Money" to send it to your US account.

[JETTABUG]

Doesn't work... Here I am in Thailand with a Thainland Baht balance of over 5000 and $27US in the US$ balance; I made a purchase for 800 Baht and PayPal took it out of my US$ balance. THis happened even though Thai Baht is the default currency on my account (which means all requests in and out are to be in Thai Baht, not US$.)

If there is any balance in the US$ portion, all payments come out of there no matter what I set the default currency to be. Further, even though the store here in Thailand made the request in Baht, PayPal converted that to US$, took what they could from my US$ balance charging me the conversion fee built in to conversion rates, then took the remainder from the Baht balance by converting my Baht it to US$ (lose money on my end) then back to Baht (I lose money again) to give to the Thai bank. Oh, but how nice of PayPal 🙂

How do I open a Thai PayPal account?