Had the appointment to get a bank account setup this morning. It \nseemed to go ok, until I realized that the last bank account I opened \nstate-side I did completely online, had immediate access to the funds \nelectronically (once they hit the account) and had my debit card within a\n couple days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The process today took the better part of an hour-and-a-half in an \noffice with a person (two, actually), and involved me handing over a \nsmall stack of cash which won’t be accessible for two days, and we won’t\n get our debit cards for two weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I tried their online banking this evening. Every time I login I need\n to provide two mostly un-memorizable bits of information (a 10 digit \nclient id and a 6 digit secret code) along with three randomly chosen \ndigits from a string of 16 random characters they gave me on a credit \ncard with a silver scratch off strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I learned I could go through a lengthy and buggy activation process \nto replace the last of those three with a one-time password from the \n(physical) token they gave me, but I gave up when the registration \nprocess switched from english to french in the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It gets better – regardless of how much I have in said account, my \nweekly ATM cash withdrawal limit is 1500\u20ac, and I can transact another \n1500\u20ac at point of sale per week. If I want to make a large purchase, I \ncan call them and “within a couple hours” they can raise the limit for a\n week or two. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m sure the cashier at Ikea will be happy to hang out for a couple \nhours while that gets worked out. Note to self: bring American credit \ncards on our shopping trips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I went to the ATM in that branch, after opening an account with \nthat bank, and used one of my US debit cards to withdraw a couple \nhundred Euro in walking around cash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m beginning to undersand why Europeans save so much more than Americans – they can’t get easy access to their money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other news, we (with a bit of help from Irene, our helpful \nrelocation contact) started the registration process with the local \ngovernment this morning. That was a reasonably short meeting – 45 \nminutes or so, most of it taken by the state agent making multiple \ncertified copies of (all pages of) our passports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tomorrow morning we go for the mandated medical exam, tomorrow \nafternoon we have someone coming to fix a leaking faucet in the \napartment, and hopefully once they leave we have time to go shop for a \nwasher dryer, which I imagine I’ll rant about later. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Had the appointment to get a bank account setup this morning. It seemed to go ok, until I realized that the last bank account I opened state-side I did completely online, had immediate access to the funds electronically (once they hit the account) and had my debit card within a couple days. The process today … Continue reading “Banking in Luxembourg – First Impressions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-luxembourg","category-selected-back-issues"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}