Hello, me and the wife have a house in Leyte, which has basically been unoccupied since our relocation to the UK in 2002. It has been looked after and maintained and she stayed there a couple of years ago with the 4 kids during a 3 week vacation. A German National and his Filipina wife have recently requested to become tenants. I think the agreed rent is around P15,000 per month. I told the wife to give the rental income to one of her sisters for family support but she would rather keep control and allocate funds as required. I can understand this. However, we have no bank account in the Philippines to receive rental income, they cancelled her accounts years ago due to 'lack of use'. Is it feasible to open a bank account in a Philippine bank from the UK? I tried a few google searches but pretty fruitless really. We're only talking a couple of hundred quid a month so don't want the rigmarole of attending a bank in person and all that palava. I've just tried opening an account with 'Wise.com' to see if that would work but I'm having problems with uploading decent photos of passports and 'selfies' to confirm identity. I'm not criticizing the banks here, they have to protect themselves from the many scams doing the rounds but is there an easy way for me to proceed, or just tell the tenats to give the rent money to the wifes ageing Mother! Any thoughts or tips? Cheers!
I would persevere and open a Wise account. They are very good. Opening a Phils bank account is difficult enough even when you're a fulltime resident here.
Thanks for that info, I must admit I'd never heard of Wise so it's good to receive a positive recommendation.
With a UK-based Wise account, you will also receive a debit card. You can also use it seamlessly with multiple currencies. Not the case (debit card) with a Phils-based one...yet.
I'm in Leyte. Wise are good but they're not a bank and most people who let their property here do it using post dated cheques - like for 6/12 months. If the tenant's cheque bounces it's a criminal offence. Giving it to the aging mother sounds good but ...hehehe your wife is right to want control of it herself - her family are probably no different to my wifes! Has your wife got a phone with GCash on it ? If the German sounds ok - maybe you could try it that way - get him to pay a couple of months in advance to start ?
Thanks for the replies. The wife does not have GCash. I'm still having a job uploading photos of passport, and selfies of sufficient quality to enable Wise.com to verify the wife's identity and complete the account opening procedure. The easiest way would probably be Western Union, but it seems a bit daft to receive circa £200 via transfer into the UK from the Philippines, only to then send a substantial portion back as family support. You'd win no prizes for financial prowess!
WU lol. Getting the ID verified or whatever it is can be a bit of a pain in the arse - you need the right id and a decent picture of it. Next time she's here, if she's like my wife, try and help her sort out her ID, phone, sim card, register the number, add WISE, GCash, Lazada and Shopee etc. Probably save you a lot of ff'ing around in the future with this and that relative!
I'm not sure that Wise will be any easier for receiving peso than any other international account? There are two problems here one of them is really the german guy's problem he has to be able to transfer peso (hard) or another currency (easier) to a foreign bank account, Wise won't give S1966W's wife local philippine peso account details so the money will still have to be transferred as Pounds, Euro or Dollars by the German (his problem) using SWIFT or the IBAN details on the Wise receivers Wise Account, once there the receiver (S1966W's wife) is still going to have to convert the resulting funds to peso and then remit (transfer) to the relevent Philippine banks of the people she wants to send to. Now Wise is certainly the cheapest way to acheive that last step but it all depends on the German being in a good enough position to be able to use his own foreign accounts to make the payments as he is probably going to struggle doing international transfers to Wise if all he has is local Philippines bank accounts.
Have a holiday in leyte and open a joint bank account, then have a good look at the property and come to some banking arrangement with the new tenants.
Again, thanks the replies. I think I'm going to wait, and get the German fellows details. I'll then just send him an email and try and sort something easy. Maybe Paypal would work, Wise.com is proving a pain in the asp to set up! I don't fancy a holiday in Leyte just yet, too bloody hot for me, I still have nightmares over the 6 months I spent working in Danao, Cebu on an ageing LPG barge project; we came close to blowing the whole bloody town up with our dodgy shenanigans. I'll maybe return to the Philippines for some furlough in a couple of years, I'm a reasonably keen cyclist and would like to do a 'top to tail' cycle tour of the entire Philippines with an ex-pat pal who now lives on Siquihor Island.
PayPal would work to get the money to you but Wise is the best solution to get it back to the Philippines. Wise shouldn't be that hard to set up it was very easy for me, just make sure the pictures are sharp taken in good light with no shadows.
I think the issue is with these modern passport images, they must be designed to be read by machine as they are extremely pixilated and blurry - to my eyes anyhow. There is no chance of taking a clear image of these, no matter how good your mobile phone camera is.
I got my new passport with the ****ty quality pictures back in 2019, I've only had Wise for the last couple of years, as an ex professional industrial photographer (35 years ago) I can state with certainty that Wise will accept pictures of a passport taken with almost all modern phone cameras, just try to take the pictures during they day when there is good ambient light in the room that you are using and try to make sure you don't have reflections in the image it can be tricky but you don't want the phone reflected or specular highlights from nearby windows appearing in the shot, but you do want good uniform light, having a fingertip or two appear in the picture is ok. The alternative is to get the passport scanned using a computer scanner, I don't like using a scanner because it forces you to put pressure on the spine of the passport and these things are electronic devices these days too much pressure can break the RFID circuit built into the cover
I think I was told that both my own and the children's passport photos were not good enough but I completed the application and received the passports anyway.
Had to take my wife's passport photos 3 times, kept getting declined. Finally got accepted and sent them to Liverpool by DHL.
What S1996W means is that the image printed in the passport is utter crap no matter how good the quality of the original image you supply them with. This was early 2019 I supplied a top quality standard passport image and they printed it this badly in the actual passport, the first immigration desk I went to when I returned the first time just after getting this passport could not beleive how bad the picture was. When you try to re photograph something this bad sometimes the result is not good enough for the likes of Wise, there is a deliberately reflective plastic lamination security panel in front of the photo and main text of the passport now which appears designed to deliberately cause reflections. I got a lot thinner than this picture during Covid however alcohol is currently curing that thinness these days edit: Wise accepted my full photo of this document.
