How I Bring USD Earnings to CAD for About $20

I get paid in USD through Toptal and I have been using Wise for years to bring that money home to Canada. It works, and the fees never felt like a big deal.

Then I ran a little experiment with $100 to see how cheap I could make the whole trip, from Toptal payout to spendable CAD.

The answer: about $20, flat, no matter the amount. And it changed how I think about where my money should land in the first place.

TL;DR

Wire your Toptal payout directly to a USD investment account ($10 fee). Invest it in USD. When you actually need CAD, buy a cash ETF (DLR.U), journal it to its CAD twin (DLR) for $9.95 plus tax, and sell.

Total: about $21 in fees. On $2,000 or on $50,000, same $21.

The problem is the percentage

Every default route from USD to CAD takes a cut of the amount, not a flat fee.

Transfer $20K from USD to CAD inside Wise and you pay about $65 USD. Wealthsimple has a Convert button that does it instantly, but it charges 1.5% over their corporate rate. On the same $20K, that is around $300.

$65 does not look like a lot. But you are not converting once. You are converting every payout, every month, for years. A percentage fee scales with your income. A flat fee does not.

The convenient buttons are the expensive part. The cheap route takes a few more steps, and here they are.

Step 1: get a USD investment account

Mine is with Wealthsimple. You need an account that actually holds USD, not a CAD account that converts on the way in.

This is worth double-checking. The way Wealthsimple handles CAD versus USD accounts is a bit opaque compared to a traditional bank. I ended up chatting with their support to confirm my account was really in USD before sending anything.

One caveat: the Wealthsimple USD account is $10/month on the Core plan, free on Premium and Generation. Factor that in if you are on Core and only convert occasionally.

Step 2: wire from Toptal

Toptal charges $10 for a wire transfer. Point it at your USD account.

Do what I did and test with $100 first. Wire details are unforgiving, and you want to see a small amount arrive in the right account before you send a real payout.

If the wire from Toptal fails for some reason, you can proxy it through Wise. Send from Toptal to your Wise USD account with a regular bank transfer inside the United States, then wire from Wise to your brokerage. Wise charges a bit less than $10 for that wire.

Step 3: let the money work in USD

Here is the part that reframed the whole thing for me.

I was going to invest most of this money anyway, in USD. So why route it through Wise at all? The wire from Toptal sends the money straight to its destination. No middleman, no USD sitting idle in a Wise account for months while I get around to moving it.

Someone might say: Wise converts in minutes, your route takes days, and the exchange rate can move against you by more than the fees you saved.

Fair. But I do not need the money right away. I want it invested, in USD, as soon as it lands. The conversion only happens later, for the part I actually need to spend in CAD. Speed is not the constraint. Where the money sits is.

Step 4: Norbert's gambit when you need CAD

When you do need CAD, you use Norbert's gambit. It sounds like a chess opening, but it is a well-worn trick among Canadian investors.

DLR is a cash ETF that trades in both currencies: DLR.U in USD, DLR in CAD. Same fund, two listings. So instead of converting currency, you convert the listing.

On Wealthsimple it works like this:

1. Buy DLR.U with your USD.
2. On the security page, select Journal and choose how many shares to move to DLR. This is self-serve on the web (not in the app).
3. Wait about two business days for the journaling to complete.
4. Sell DLR and receive CAD.

The journaling fee is $9.95 plus tax, charged in CAD, so keep a small CAD balance in the account or the request can fail.

The caveats

You are still exposed to the bid-ask spread on DLR, and the exchange rate can drift during the two business days your shares are being journaled. On large amounts this is usually still far cheaper than 1.5%, but it is not zero risk.

The journaling is web only for now, and your shares are locked while the request is pending.

And again: test the wire with a small amount first. The $10 fee on a $100 test is cheap insurance.

Closing

The routes that convert your money instantly all charge a percentage of it. The route that charges flat fees asks for a bit of patience and a few extra steps.

If you are a Canadian freelancer paid in USD, structure the flow so the money lands where it works: wire to your USD investment account, invest, and convert to CAD only what you need, when you need it, for $10 a trip.

Run the $100 experiment. Worst case, it costs you a wire fee to find out.