Moving Money From American Paypal to Israeli Bank Account


You may ask yourself why would anyone be trying to move money from an American paypal account to an Israeli bank account? There are simple things that would make someone want to do this, firstly if you opened your paypal account while in the US your email address becomes linked to the account so in order to open an Israeli paypal account you will need a new email address which is a small annoyance. If you have American bank accounts it would make sense to have paypal from the US, but then what if you make aliya? Now you want to have access to that money, but paypal doesn’t allow you to link an Israeli Bank account to your American paypal.

When I first began trying to figure out to move money from an American paypal account to an Israeli I had never thought that it would be so difficult. It has been months working out how to do this, testing different methods and Googleing to see if anyone else was having this issue, a part of me hoping someone else had figured it out. It was just by chance that I finally figured it out; it was one of those moments where you say to yourself “now why didn’t I think of that weeks ago?”

One of the first problems had been that my paypal account was an American one, I had signed up for it while being in the states so it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to move money into my Israeli Bank account without absurd charges. A friend of mine had an Israeli paypal account and thought it would be as simple as 1, 2, 3 to move money from one account to the other and then into a bank account. It would seem that we were right, it just took some time to get there. When ever we tried to send money from one account to the other we always got the same error. That paypal does not allow sending money to the specified account.

This morning I was sitting in class playing with paypal I hit the send money button and selected the personal payment option but hit a wall again. Then I looked at the page and wondered what if I tried to send the money not as a personal “gift” but as a payment for a service or good the other person had provided me? Walla! I hit payment for “goods” and was prompted to enter my security question before sending the money! What I did next was open a new paypal account with my alternate email (the one I send all my spam to) but this time I opened it as an Israeli. This new account I linked to my Israeli bank account, now its as simple as sending a “gift” to myself I can move money from one paypal account to the other and then on to my bank account.

There is a charge from moving money from paypal to a bank account in Israel, its 8 NIS for transfers under 1,000 NIS and they take 1.20 NIS per transfer but this is a small price to pay for a transaction that done through the banks could cost upwards of $20 for a IBAN or wire transfer. Who’d have thought at changing one setting would make all the difference.