If you are a freelancer and obtaing your payments through online inward remittances to India then you will run into either Paypal/MoneyBookers or one your Bank with their wire transfers services. The charges levied by both paypal and moneybookers are of similar nature and you end up paying around 5% of your forex amount for inward remittances to India . This is especially true after incidents of past few days in which paypal had to respond to and function within the purview of Indian tax law . It is better to sign with a bank that gives cost effective wire transfer charges. Let me know if you know of any. SBI works through Standard chartered and they charge about $20 for intermediary services. This adds on to the $30 that your client or online marketplaces like odesk adds to your online services fee. Thus its always $50 no matter what amount you recieve. So they become effective means if you have amount crossing over $1000 per transaction and that does not happen ofte...
"Sofar" captures the distance traveled so far from now.