Japan Life: Sending money from Japan to the Philippines

I think it is safe to say that most of Filipinos living here in Japan sends money to the Philippines from time to time. It could be for supporting our love ones or for our investments in the Philippines. Either way, as much as possible we try to get the best exchange rate with the cheapest remittance fee that we can get for our remittances.

You probably only need a single remittance service for all your money transferring needs. In any case, here are the services I used since living here in Japan:

Metrobank Easy Transfer Service (METS)

METS is a service provided by Metrobank Japan. It’s my main mode of sending money to my parents for quite some time now.

What I like about this service is that the customer service is really great. I never had an issue with any of my remittance and in case of problem, you can always call them.

Their customer service accepts Tagalog, English and Japanese inquiries so we are pretty much covered even if our Japanese language skill is still not good.

Here is a link to METS website.

TransferWise

TransferWise is a UK-based money transfer service and among the remittance services that I use, this has the highest exchange rate from Japanese Yen to Philippine Peso all the time.

Since this is a global company, customer service is a bit slow to respond. They take hours or a day to reply to emails and I don’t really like calling them for inquiries about my remittance.

I mainly use TransferWise to send money to my personal Philippine savings account.

Here is a link to TransferWise website.

Western Union Money Transfer

I don’t really use this service anymore since the other 2 above are good enough to accommodate all my remittance needs. This was my main mode of remittance to my parents before I use METS.

Basically, it’s a bit troublesome since you will need to go the Western Union agent’s location personally to do the money transfer. You fill up a form and hand over the money physically. On top of that, exchange rate is not really that good.


So there you have it, these are the services I use to send money from Japan to the Philippines. Do you use a different service? Do you think it’s better? Comment below and let us know.

4 thoughts on “Japan Life: Sending money from Japan to the Philippines”

  1. Hi,
    When you use TransferWise, do you use payment by Bank Transfer of by Card?
    It seems that paying your remittance+remittance fee by card has fees of somewhere from 2.9% to 3.1%. If you’re paying your remittance through bank transfer, does it also have a fee? If there is, how much is it?

    Thank you very much for your help!

    1. Hi Krish,

      I always use payment by bank transfer.
      I usually transfer around 200,000 yen monthly and the fee when using bank transfer payment would be around 1% (1,976 yen last time I did it).
      For debit card payment, it’s around 4% (8,197 yen).

      It is more expensive to pay using debit card so I recommend using bank transfer. 🙂

  2. Hello is it possible to send paper money from japan to Philippines using japan post? Is it allowed?

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