Skip to main content

Day to Day banking

In the US, if you need to send someone money, it goes like this:

  1. The recipient gives you his or her address
  2. You mail a check to the recipient
  3. The recipient carries around the check for a few days, and eventually takes it to his or her bank.
  4. The recipient's bank cashes the check and presents the check to your bank.
  5. Your bank sends the money to the recipient's bank.
In Europe, it works like this:
  1. The recipient gives you his or her IBAN and optionally, a reference number (equivalent to the "note" field on a check)
  2. You tell your bank (via their website) to send money to that IBAN and include the reference number, if there is one
  3. Your bank sends the money to the recipient's bank.
Now, the key thing to understand is that almost everyone only knows their own system. Europeans have no idea what to do with a check, and Americans have no idea what to do with an IBAN. 

Fortunately, the US is big enough that some of the European banks know how to deal with it -- sort of. Unfortunately, they use terminology that, while correct, is not the terminology used by the US. For example, do you know your Fedwire or ABA number? It's the first 9 digits on the bottom left of your checks, often called a routing number. Here, you'll be asked for your Fedwire number or your ABA number, not your routing number.

Many banks, in an effort to be helpful, will also have or be able to provide a Fedwire/ABA number. Unfortunately, that's all they'll provide. Their customer service people will have no idea what to do with it, or they'll assume that ABA plus account number is all that you need. If you tell them that you need an address where you can mail a check, they'll be confused or horrified. 

I'm learning all of this because the company that is helping with our move sent us a bill with almost, but not quite entirely, unhelpful information. They wanted us to pay $52.50 to a US bank (amusingly, a former employer), and gave us only account information and a reference number. To pay that bill, even though I have a US checking account, I had to do a wire transfer that cost almost as much as the bill itself.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fixing Linux Audio

This is somewhat technical, and it's aimed at people who use Linux and are comfortable editing files from the command line. I was looking for a quick fix, but discovered that most of the documentation out there is wrong. So, I had to research what it all meant, figure out what the correct settings were, and write it all down. For the Impatient If you use Linux, and you're just looking for a quick way to make your sound better, add these lines to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or $HOME/.config/pulse/daemon.conf   default-sample-format = s32ne default-sample-rate = 192000 high-priority = yes default-fragments = 8 resample-method = speex-float-10 I've tested this on Fedora and Ubuntu with no problems. Also, if you're using an external DAC (if you're not sure, then you're not using one), be sure that it has sufficient power (either plugged directly into the computer or into a powered USB hub. DO NOT plug it into an unpowered hub or dongle. A...
Post a Comment
Read more