Remittances Just Hit a New Record. Your Mom Still Says the Money Doesn't Reach Friday.
OFWs are sending home more dollars than ever. Households say groceries, tuition, and electric bills are eating it before the month ends.
By Maria Garcia
The Bangko Sentral keeps announcing record remittance numbers. Households receiving that money keep saying the same thing: it runs out before payday week is over.
Both can be true. The dollar figure is up. The peso buying power is shrinking. The bills waiting at the door are bigger than they were two years ago.
The math the headlines skip
A nurse in Riyadh sending the same monthly allotment as 2022 is not sending the same help. The peso has moved. Rice has moved. Electricity has moved. School fees have moved. The remittance line on a bank statement looks identical. The grocery receipt does not.
Households know this without needing a chart. The envelope from the padala arrives, gets divided into tuition, Meralco, the loan to the cousin, the maintenance meds for Lola, the baon for three kids, and what is left does not cover the wet market run on Saturday.
What the receiving end actually pays for
Talk to families in Pampanga, Iloilo, or Cagayan de Oro and the remittance is not savings. It is the operating budget. Rent or amortization. Tuition that climbs every June. Hospital bills that never fully close. A sari-sari store tab that grows quietly between padalas.
Some of it goes to things the sender does not know about. A sibling's failed online business. A roof that leaked during the last typhoon. A funeral. A bail. A wedding nobody could say no to.
The OFW abroad sees the deposit confirmation and assumes the family is fine. The family at home sees the same deposit and starts subtracting immediately.
The dollar is strong. So is the grocery bill.
Inflation in the Philippines has cooled on paper, but the categories that hit OFW households hardest, food, utilities, education, transport, have not gone back to where they were. The peso-dollar rate gives senders a small bump. Landlords and school registrars took bigger ones.
Recruitment agencies abroad are also taking more. Placement fees, processing fees, mandatory insurance, accommodation deductions. The gross salary in the contract and the net amount that lands in a GCash account are two different numbers, and the gap has widened.
The quiet pressure on the sender
OFWs read the same news about record remittances and feel the implication. If the country is receiving more, the family should be doing better. When relatives still ask for extra in the middle of the month, the sender wonders what is being mismanaged on the other end.
Usually nothing is being mismanaged. The money is just smaller than it looks. The contract abroad is fixed in dirhams or riyals or Hong Kong dollars. The bills at home are not.
What nobody is fixing
The remittance economy works because individual families absorb the gap quietly. Senders take a second job on their day off. Receivers skip the medication for a month. Kids transfer from private to public school and nobody posts about it.
Bangko Sentral will announce another record next quarter. The press release will frame it as resilience. In a kitchen in Bulacan, somebody will be doing the math on whether to pay the Meralco bill in full or split it across two cutoffs, and the padala will already be gone.
