(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

it's a shame i'm not that kind of person who can reliably produce Content (of any sort, let alone the kind people like) because even a little bit of patreon money goes a long way when you're converting from usd to ars

not that my financial situation is bad or anything, just idle thoughts

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Right, I *had* vaguely heard that the Argentinian economy was much more volatile. Our inflation rate is quite low, I'm told, and the USD spot-rate (expressed in terms of number of U.S. cents it takes to buy one Canadian dollar) has been pretty steady at 75 ± ~2 for years now.

(Though I do remember a time that we were at parity: perhaps some of the book bloggers I worked for remembered it too, and hadn't been paying enough attention to notice that this is no longer the case. In fact, "take Amazon-US credits, buy iPad, arrange Craigslist sale, suffer 10% in resale losses, deposit the cash into your bank, buy something on amazon.ca and pay with a debit card (or, even better, a credit card)" results in *more* money than taking Amazon-CA credits at parity and paying them directly, *and* you get the flexibility of being able to buy something other than Amazon (the selection at which is really not all it's cracked up to be, especially if you are more sensitive to price than to convenience†).)

(and wait until you learn about Norbert's Gambits. and I have a horrible feeling that once my financial situation is good enough for it to come up, I'm going to have to learn how to keep my *investments* in USD, in order to play nice with the IRS (and then do gambits to *get* the USD for it). ...I might just use savings accounts until I have enough built up that paying a specialist accountant $500/year to fill out Qualified Electing Fund paperwork is a decently small percentage of the total money.

(or maybe I'll get *very* lucky and the United States will make like a *normal* country and stop taxing non-resident citizens, and I'll stop having to contort myself into their convoluted foreign-investment tax laws. (or even just make an exception that country-of-residence investments don't count as foreign! that would be enough!) but I don't want to bet on it.))


P.S. Breaking news: Paypal about to become even worse at this.

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†And if you're seriously considering going through that rigmarole in order to get 90 U.S. cents on the dollar instead of 75, you are clearly more sensitive to price than to convenience.