PayPal, you're dead to me.

Important update for kind donors and monthly patrons

Hi everyone. Sorry to be bombarding people with posts, but this is a development just from this morning. If you are a monthly patron donor through my Ko-Fi studio blog, Hilary White; Sacred Art, you will want to know that I’ve had to shut off my Canadian PayPal account. Payments you make, whether one-off donations or monthly patron subscriptions, through PayPal won’t be completed.

If you'd like to continue ongoing support (and I'd appreciate it more than you know…it currently accounts for more than half my monthly income of under $900/month) you can switch to using Stripe. Stripe is a kind of universal translator for online payments; all credit cards and every online payment application you can think of are supported. It’s already up and running at the studio blog.

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So if you’d like to continue donating through Ko-fi you can keep doing that with Stripe here—>

This will take you to my studio blog, where you can also have a browse around the gallery to see the kind of work I’m trying to learn to do.

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If you’re a monthly patron, I’ll be sending you an email explaining what’s happening.

I might at some point open a PP account attached to my Italian banking stuff if I find there’s a need, but I hope not to have to work with those thieves anymore at all. They’ve been complete crap at customer service, and are apparently incapable of solving the current problem, which they created. So, we’re done.

I've disabled all incoming PayPal stuff through the Ko-Fi page, and shut off the independent donation button. And shut off all automatic payments out of PP and transferred the balance to my Canadian bank account. They're refusing for now to allow me to close the account, but I'm choking it to death.

There's been a lot of changes in the last few months to the nuts n' bolts aspect of my life. As of January this year I've got legal "residenza" in Italy - about the equivalent of "landed immigrant" status - an Italian ID card and an Italian bank account. This means I’m here now, for good, and really have no further practical connections with Canada at all, except my Toronto Dominion bank account, that I use PayPal to funnel money into, almost exclusively through donations and patronages via Ko-fi. Subscriptions to this site, The Sacred Arts Project, go into Stripe and then into the Italian account.

So, I think the day has come. I'm closing my Canadian PayPal account, disabling all payments, to and from. The new BBVA account I've got here doesn't charge me anything - no monthly fees or "service charges" and no fees for cash withdrawals over 100 Euros or online payments. Not a dime.

I've successfully field tested the new account for both direct debit card payments to order online things and for ATM cash withdrawals - with no fees… zero! So, there's really no more need for giving those criminals at PayPal any more of our money.

I'll have to see about attaching the Canadian bank account to the Stripe account, but if that's not possible, I guess I'll be severing that too. They have been charging me $17 CAD/month just to keep the thing open and $5 for every ATM cash withdrawal anyway, and the CAD -> Euro exchange is abysmal. So if I have to close it, I guess I will. It will feel weird; I've had the TD account since 1997 and it's really my last tie with Canada.

So, if you haven’t subscribed at Hilary White; Sacred Art, you can do that here, and you’ll get the paywalled posts with all the cool and fun extra stuff that’s coming; exclusive photos, videos, downloadables, deep dives into all manner of ancient and glorious things. And it’ll let me keep doing the work, but also expanding into new things.

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