After putting a lot of effort into switching our streaming services (and other foreign-billed online subscriptions) over to my Globe bill so that it would be processed by a local biller, I finally found the time to go over my latest bill. The good news: I wasn't being charged a 1% foreign biller fee by BPI. The bad news: I was charged 12% VAT on top of all of my subscription fees. So switching things over to Globe billing actually cost me more money than if I had left things alone.
Some things are inevitable, I suppose.
If I really want to avoid paying the 1% fee, I'd need to switch things over to GCash maybe or get approved for one of the few credit cards that haven't started charging this fee. But that feels like too much of a hassle, plus having all those online fees on GCash will further impact cash flow. It also doesn't help that all GCash cash-in methods that I have access to incur additional fees as well, so GCash billing isn't perfect without its share of complications either.
Armed with this new information, I've shifted all of my online transactions back to my BPI credit card to keep things simple, and hope to make the most of our BPI Rewards points. It's still not great and admittedly I'm still tempted to try to get a Unionbank credit card when I can try re-applying later in the year. But let's see how things go.
Min-maxing real-life things isn't as fun as it is in games, but it's still super necessary.
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