I spent my weekend filling out far too much paperwork for tax and insurance purposes and, in the process, stumbled across foreign charges in my main chequing account that came outta nowhere. COMMENCE OPERATION FREAKOUT. I never use my debit card outside of trusted places close to home, never when I go to the US, never at any gas station, etc. I even always call them when I leave the country so they know exactly where I’ll be and when so they don’t turn off my credit card in case I need it in an emergency. Not that I want this to be an invitation for Americans to mug me, but I operate strictly on cash down there to avoid ridonkulous fees and potential fraud. It sounds paranoid, but makes me feel more secure.
Phone support was most comforting and explained the process of going to my home branch and filling out a ton of paperwork. Knowing I had to wait until Monday, I tried not to login to my account and check in every hour.
Hello Monday. Went to the bank 10 minutes before it opened to be first in line. It may be a teeny branch, but very high traffic. Super impatient and entirely unsympathetic lady deigns to bring up my account info for the dates in question. Eventually she was able to explain that my account was not set up the way I had requested it to be done through my money manager and that’s what ended up royally screwing me.
I deposit a USD cheque, it goes in the account. Then, later, they take it out. Then, later, they give it back minus an insane service charge. Example: 100 USD would give me 86 CAD. NOT KNOWING THIS, AT ALL, has cost me a great deal of cash. I had specifically requested an account that deals with American cash, seeing as that’s a big chunk of my income, and I was let down. This account is fairly new, and freelancers are often paid well after the article goes live, so the whole process was a mess and involved bank codes I had never seen before, leading to the freakout since it showed that it happened not at my home branch. Impatient lady suggested, for the future, a strictly US account, but then I’d still get reamed when converting that to Canadian. I don’t know what to do right now. So livid. Wish phone support, while looking at my account, was able to tell me earlier so I would not have been as spooked. At least now I know the bank codes to see when it happens again and the weird timing between the deposit, removal, and butchered return.
Lesson ~ even if you have a personal finance person taking care of this sort of thing for you, quadruple check that it’s done correctly or you will severely pay for it.
Semi-related: The bank is close to resolving the paypal issue so I can sell a big chunk of my game collection and collect the money from it. And will again destroy me on the conversion of US cash, so I may have to force the fees from buyers in Canadian dollars. I know this will put extra charges on buyers and I do apologise, but that’s too big of a hit for me to take on every sale :(
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Ouch, that’s a damn big hit, and putting it in, taking it out, putting it back in…erm what? I know our banks are crazy over here (well we had to sink 80 billion Euro into them so far), but at least when you desposit a cheque, regardless of currency, they do the conversion straight away and deposit it immediately. None of this crazy back and forth stuff.
“Example: 100 USD would give me 86 CAD. NOT KNOWING THIS, AT ALL, has cost me a great deal of cash.”
So either they’re taking 10% or the per transaction fees coincidentally came out to the equivalent of a tithe. Ouch.
Some quick Google searching came up with this two year old thread from Ask MetaFilter with advice on of accounts to handle USD. http://preview.tinyurl.com/3q56mxk Nothing on foreign exchange fees specifically (other than the opinion everyone has some). Looking around at one of the banks mentioned revealed a cross-border debit card plan where the fees are $1 (assuming CAD) per transaction and 2.5% on top of whatever Acxsys Corp. decides the exchange rate should be. http://preview.tinyurl.com/3pot8fa Seems to me if a debit card account is willing to grant up to 6 CAD over what your bank currently does on a similar sort of transaction, it might be time to shop around. But, I make no claims of expertise in international banking.
Sorry, I confused myself into thinking that debit card example was more relevant than it is. It wouldn’t be “up to 6 CAD over…” since its a conversion from CAD to USD and you need the opposite. Please disregard that.
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