Remittances to Pakistan by Pakistani Expats

Do you know what's the biggest export of Pakistan? It's still Textile, amounting to 1.1 billion USD in a single month (stats from Aug 2013). But you might be surprised to know that this export is now matched by the remittances sent in by Pakistanis from abroad to their families back home. The figure is more than a billion dollars in a single month!

Remittances from Pakistani Expats in Sep-2013

The data about remittances is publicly available from the State Bank of Pakistan. Below, we analyse some of the data from September 2013:

Source: State Bank of Pakistan (Home Remittances Sep-2013)

The above figures are in millions of dollars, remitted by Pakistanis in a single month, broken down by countries.

As you can see, the largest remittances come from four countries: Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, the UAE, the UK and the USA. Amount of money remitted from KSA to Pakistan in a single month is 373 million US dollars, followed by the UAE at 276 million USD. Being Pakistanis, we also know that besides Gulf countries, a large number of Pakistanis live in the UK and the US.

Year on year increase in remittances

The following graph shows yearly increase in the last 10 years. Mind that the figures are in USD, and hence, these remittances further strengthen the economy in the backdrop of Rupee losing against Dollar:

Source: World Bank Migration & Remittances Data

Why have the remittances gone up?

A working paper by IMF (International Monetary Fund), published in 2011 studies the factors behind this trend of remittances.

The hypothesis presented in the IMF paper are interesting, especially considering the fact that the world economy hasn't been doing really well in general during the last 10 years. The working paper from IMF narrows down everything to the number of migrants moving out of Pakistan and their general skill-level. 

And once again, being Pakistanis, we know that the large outflux of skilled migrants is actually due to the law and order situation in Pakistan. While these migrants are helping a lot to the economy, the "brain drain" impact can't be ignored.

What method do you use for remittance?

Are you a Pakistani living abroad? I am sure you send money back home. What's the method that you use? Do you think you are getting the best rates with minimal transaction fee?

Sending Money to Pakistan from the UK

If you regularly remit money from the UK to Pakistan, I highly recommend using HBL eRemit service. Below is a review of the options available to you; I recommend trying both HBL eRemit and United Bank UK. Please post your experiences here.

Pound Coins by Images_of_Money

HBL eRemit: This the best service, even better if you are an HBL UK customer; however, being HBL UK customer is not mandatory. You can register online. HBL will post you your password via mail. Once received, you can add any UK debit card and use that to send money to any bank account in Pakistan.


The charges are GBP 5 per transaction (it's free if you use HBL UK debit card). The time taken for the complete transfer is dependent on the location of the branch where you are sending the money---remote branches take time; branches in metropolitans get money faster.

United Bank UK: Formerly, known as United National Bank UK was a joint venture between UBL and National Bank of Pakistan. It seems that UBL has now completely taken over. Though their service is free of charge, I faced problems during sign up. It could have been great if there IT staff was able to assist. Do give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

Western Union: This should be your last preference, given the above two. Any ways, if time is of essence to you, Western Union is the best. Money transfer takes a day or two at maximum. However, please note that the money is received in cash. I, for one, dread this due to the law and order situation of Pakistan (and specially of Karachi). As of today, Western Union doesn't offer direct transfers to bank accounts in Pakistan.

Income Tax Return Forms 2010

So, September came and went away. The time to file your Income Tax (IT) returns has been extended till 15th October. Traditionally, you download return forms (and wealth statement form as well, if applicable); fill them by hand and submit in person to IT office. However, eFiling has been made possible by Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) for the last few years.

The FBR portal is not bad (considering the overall deteriorating situation of almost everything in Pakistan). The portal allows you to export/ import your data for offline filing via MS Excel; except for one minor problem: several sections of the sheet are protected by a password! Yes, you read it correct. I repeat: the Excel sheets which you have to fill for your Income Tax returns are password protected!

A few weeks ago, there was a letter to the editor on precisely the same topic in Dawn.

If you are using Excel 2007, the menu option to "unprotect" or unlock your sheet is Review -> Changes -> Unprotect Sheet. It will ask you for a password but FBR's website gives you no clue as to what the password is. Fortunately for us, cracking Excel passwords is not hard. There can be many password which can unlock one sheet. In the case of FBR's eFiling Excel sheets, one such password is AABABBABABBW.

A macro to crack Excel passwords in general is provided below (author unknown):

Sub PasswordBreaker()
    'Author unknown
    'Breaks worksheet password protection.
    Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
    Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
    Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
    Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer
    On Error Resume Next
    For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
    For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
    For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
    For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126
    ActiveSheet.Unprotect Chr(i) & Chr(j) & Chr(k) & _
        Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & Chr(i3) & _
        Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
    If ActiveSheet.ProtectContents = False Then
        MsgBox "One usable password is " & Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
            Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
            Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
         Exit Sub
    End If
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
End Sub

Happy filing!

Adsense Statistics, Month 4

Article edited, considering that sharing of adsense statistics could be a violation of adsense terms and conditions

I made some progress in revenue this month. The page impressions reached close to 2000 but I am still within one digit adsense revenue range. TB test for UK and Sending Money via Western Union remain the most revenue generating pages.

I have a lot to say as to what's happening behind the scenes (known to me via Google Analytics) but I leave that discussion to go in the comments section of this post.

Adsense Revenue of Past 3 Months

• Month 3
• Month 2
• Month 1

Adsense Statistics, Month 3

Article edited, considering that sharing of adsense statistics could be a violation of adsense terms and conditions

Making progress; reached close to 1500 page impressions this month. The black swan this month was a click which earned $0.50 (33% of the total revenue). This is much sane as compared to first month (where a single click earned $0.85) or second month (where a single click earned $0.97). The total revenue is 5 cents lower but the number of clicks has increased. Thanks to the little experiment I did!

I created a page on how to get TB certificate for UK visa in Karachi. This information is almost nowhere on the Internet, and the search engine traffic surged! The nice thing about search engine traffic is that everything is measured with reference to a "page" and not with reference to a site. Hence, a single off-topic article can bring lots of traffic. Making them stay and ensuring that they come back is a totally different ball game!

Adsense Statistics, Month 2

Article edited, considering that sharing of adsense statistics could be a violation of adsense terms and conditions

I still have under 1000 visitors a month. The revenue, of course, is above one dollar now. I had had another Black Swan this month generating $0.97! The least earning click got me $0.01---that's again a huge difference. What would I do without $1 visitors!

First month statistics were shared earlier.

Adsense Statistics

Article edited, considering that sharing of adsense statistics could be a violation of adsense terms and conditions

Around 900 visitors and a few clicks. I've started making money at adsense. But they rightly say that there is always "beginner's luck and warrior's ending:" The first click on my blog brought $0.85 while the other two collectively brought $0.14. That's a huge difference!

Remittance: All Options!

If you are an expat who remits money to homeland, you must have faced not only high remittance fee but also a low exchange rate. It's typical for people remitting money from the UAE (or Middle East in general) to Pakistan.

Worldbank now lets you view the various remittance options by choosing the sending and receiving countries. So, when you chose remittance options from UAE to Pakistan, the available options list down everything from Al Ansari Exchange (least costly) to Lari (most costly)---Western Union somewhere lies in the middle.

Do you remit frequently to Pakistan? What options do you use?

Google Adsense for Domains

Only one sentence: Don't try Google Adsense for Domains! While the idea seems good---you have a parked domain, why not get some revenue out of it---it doesn't work in reality. You cannot promote your parked site; firstly promoting a parked site doesn't make any sense but more importantly, Google doesn't allow you to do that with parked domains. To see how a parked domain with Google Adsense for domains looks like you can type in www.freelancephpmysql.net in your address bar.

The only traffic that you can expect in such a parked domain can come from people

• typing an address in their browser thinking that something must come up
• people "mistyping" something; for example, going to facebok.com instead of facebook.com

Those who claim to be making money promote their parked site using non-conventional methods---such as putting a viral video on youtube and showing an address within there.

Some References:

• Webmaster World
• Adsense Forum

The Money Machine

This post has been edited after getting some comments from Jawad Farid on Oil Insights.

The Money Machine is a hypothetical machine that churns out money for you even when you are asleep. Google's ads supported search engine empire is an example. Your investment in a fixed deposit certificate could be another.

I want to build such a machine for myself---not because there is a never ending lust for money but because such a machine can let you take bold decisions in life; for example, it can empower you to work for love and not for money in your 9-6 routine.

So, what can be the possible options?

One is, of course, adsense OR any other ad brokerage system, if you can weave out interesting content on the web. Please note that there is difference in earning money by writing articles for someone and earning money by publishing something. The former is directly proportional to the effort you are putting in. The later is "scalable"---you can grow from 100 dollars to a million dollars without requiring proportional workforce.

An example is freepaisa.com, a news site for branchless banking. A quick search on who.is tells that the domain is registered by one Kaiser Shahzad, living at Malir Halt, Karachi. The domain is hosted on godaddy.com. Another quick search on linkedin for Kaiser Shahzad tells that the guy has some background on Branchless banking and is somehow associated to Fundamo. The Alexa rank of freepaisa.com is 6,422,215. There was only 1 site linking in but as soon as I post this article, there will be two, and this will impact the search engine ranking of freepaisa.com. So, the basic model is to register a domain; put in some content and get ads from Google.

How much money would this guy be making? I've no idea. In fact, in such models, nobody seems to have a precise answer. But I can give you another example.

Jawad Farid recently registered oil-price.net. If you take a look at the site, there is hardly anything appreciable from a web-designing point of view. I can say that the content on this site isn't very informative either (I might be wrong here as I have no background on petroleum or oil pricing).

Jawad Farid recently registered http://oilinsights.net and he has been providing updates on his Alchemya blog. By now, he has started making a few dollars every month. Of course, the path wasn't as simple as stated in here.

So, you go the idea? You find a topic that interests you (having an interest is important because you have to "generate content" for your website); register a domain---make sure that you use Google Insights for Search to come up with the most sought after keywords---your domain must have the targetted keyword; publish content, and make sure that you use Google Analytics to understand what is popular in your site and what couldn't gain significant momentum. To get your site listed properly on The Search Engine, you must submit your sitemap via Google Webmaster Central to Google. And finally, you must build links to your sites---in other terms, work on SEO. Once you cross all stages, you should start building a community around your website---i.e., make the visitors come again and again---and add some CPM ads apart from CPC ones.


How much money can be made in such a model? As I said earlier, nobody has the right answer. But people have left their day time jobs when this model has worked for them. Here is a list of Indian bloggers with their "estimated" adsense revenue.


While the answer is not accurately given anywhere but one thing is sure, Google Adsense is the most revenue generating for publishers, followed by Chitika. And also for sure, the amount of money generated is directly related to the traffic you have. So, just to understand how adsense works, I am temporarily adding "ads" to this blog. It's not meant to generate money but to understand the mechanics of the same.


to be continued...

Sending Money via Western Union from Pakistan

This is being written with a hope that an astray soul in search of the titled information will find this useful.

You may have seen Western Union sign-boards outside branches of various banks in Pakistan. In fact, it's not just banks, Pakistan Post also acts as a Western Union agent now. It's only when you have to send money abroad that you come to know that these particular agents (banks and the post offices) only provide one way service---you can receive money but you can't send from there.

So, how can I send money from Pakistan via Western Union?

So, a quick search on Western Union firstly hinted me that you can send money online if you have a Visa credit card! But this turned out to be true only for people sending money from some countries. Previously online credit card transactions were only allowed from the US, but now it's also possible from the UK, and perhaps a few other countries.

Thus, a quest for finding a Western Union office in Karachi from where you can send money abroad began.

Pakistan Currency Exchange in Karachi

There is one Pakistan Currency Exchange with a branch in Nursery, PECHS. The guy whom I interacted with at Nursery was surprisingly well mannered. I have used the service to send money to the UAE, and I would like to hear your views about this and other agents you might have used to send money via Western Union from Pakistan.

Having said that, let's talk about the more interesting part---the process to send money...

In order to set "standard" charges for money transfer, Pakistan Currency Exchange maintains everything in base currency. So, if you want to send UAE Dirhams abroad and you are carrying the exact amount in the destination currency, they will first "buy" it from you and then "sell" it to you again. Of course, this means that within a flash of a second you'll lose money :) It's better to take Pakistan Rupees with you and buy the destination currency right.

As an identity proof, it's better you take a photocopy of your CNIC with you---they can do it for you but I always prefer to have a copy done myself beforehand.


On a side note, do you know which countries are sending in the highest amount of remittances into Pakistan?