Job Discussion Forums

[adventuramust]

I thought I read somewhere, not sure if it was an individual contract or some general employment regulations that you could opt to have 70% of your earnings converted to your home currency each month.

Does anyone know about this? Or where I may have seen it?

[Yu]

Might depend a little on the school. Might not be written policy, but I do think there are ways of doing it. My former school did not let me convert anything. This time I converted 100% (though I am not sure why I was able to do this.)

[Roger]

70% is the maximum. You must be legally employed and your FAO should set up for you a bank account with the BOC.
It's not always a smooth ride and you are bound to waste lots of hours haggling with incompetent bank tellers!
To convert your salary into foreign currency you must breing documentation including your contract.n

[vikdk]

one says a 100% the other says 70% - I'm already confused - Why does one poster say they've actually done something that the other says shouldn't be possible? Is this just China at its best or maybe its more like what you can expect when asking for advice at daves

[7969]

converted 100% of how much? a full years salary? my school says 70% but i never convert it anyway as i manage to spend most of what i earn here. surely the rules can always be bent here to accommodate anyone.

and what if my home currency is the zambian kwacha? can i convert RMB into those at BOC? yes vikdk, this is the type of advice you get at daves

[Super Mario]

In the back of the FE Certificate there's a section for your FAO to fill in, saying how much you can convert a month. Mine wrote 8,000, which was 100%. My salary was paid into the ICBC, not BOC.
When ready, I withdrew the cash, headed downtown to my foreign bank, together with tax certificates, red and green books and passport, and did the transaction in 15 minutes.

[jeffinflorida]

A guy at my last school needed to do this.

He and Dumb FAO Chick went to the bank, she rattled off his needs in Chinese and the bank gave him lots of money in American Dollars.

The contract said 70% but the actual transaction was everything in his bank account. When i asked him he said there was no conversion of a precentage done - they were told to convert it all to US Dollars and they did.

No hassle. No waiting.

[Yu]

My undersanding was that I should only be able to convery 50% (I am here with a kid... might even be 30%... anyway some ridiculously low percentage) and my currency wasnt converted by the bank through my knowledge. I brought the amount of money I had been paid to date back to my employer and asked to have it all converted. A few days later I picked up the money from the finance department. I am not sure when the next chance will be to convert money. I will ask next time I get paid. Sometimes I dont know the rules. I dont think everyone follows the rules, so if I am able to work the rules to my advantage, I am gonna work it.

The other way I convert money is that when I have visitors, I tell them to pay my mom in USD the amount they spend when they are here. We just check the current exchange rate they would get if they changed dollars here and use that. This way the person travelling does not have to deal with getting traveller's checks or carrying around large sums of cash, and later when I return to the states, I will not have a problem doing this either.

[vikdk]

[kev7161]

In my contract, my school wrote 50%. The