When you’ve got some extra kuai in your WeChat wallet – what can ya do?
Invest in GOOOOOOLD! Well gold derivatives of some sort, but tied to the value anyway!
A Chinese friend taught me this not too long ago, and it doesn’t seem to be well-known among Expats I’ve brought this up to, including some of our colleagues here at ExpatInvest. As foreigners, it can feel like we don’t have many options to invest in China, so this is a nice simple way to have something locally besides RMB.
First off, you’re going to need to have a verified Wechat account and Wechat Pay fully set up and working.
Also, I’m referring to China based Wechat accounts only – that is, those with a Chinese bank card connected to them. We haven’t been able to confirm if this works with non-China Wechat accounts, so if you can confirm it – please let us know!
Now that we’ve knocked out the pre-reqs, let’s dive in！
1) From your main “Chats” page, use the Search function to locate the mini program titled “腾讯黄金红包” (Téngxùn huángjīn hóngbāo), which translates majestically to “Tencent Gold Red Packet”.
We are looking for the Mini Program, which should be the first result.
2) Click on the mini program and you’ll be shown 3 main things:
Your current balance.
The option to send a gold [red] packet to someone else! Could make for a nice wedding gift?!
The current price of gold and the golden “买入” or “Buy” button. That’s the one we want!
3) On the next screen they ask you how many 克 (kè) you’d like to buy!
FYI: kè means gram in Chinese. Looks like 1 kè is going for 398.34 kuài today. Let’s go ahead and change those kuài to kè. The smallest amount you can buy each time is 1 kè.
I am writing this in the morning so I caught a nice warning! They will only accept buys & sells during business hours (M-F 9:40-22:20).
5) Click through the payment prompts and you’re all set. The transactions are pretty instantaneous – you may not actually own a small physical block of gold now – but the mini app will begin tracking the value of your gold right away.
Speaking of tracking, you can check your balance and the recent price of gold (up to 1 year ago) any time by going back to the main landing screen and clicking in the bottom white box.
And there you have it! A nice alternative to keeping too much cash in your WeChat wallet.
Looking for more productive things to do with your RMB? That’s what we do here!
