The Bank Part 3

Who would have believed that there would be a third part to this story?! 

Okay, it is October and our bank account finally does seem to be working properly.  I only say “seems to be” because we are still not entirely sure.  But to get us to this point, I need to back up a little.

Things seemed to be progressing with the bank back in August.  We got the paperwork figured out to make sure we were legitimate and we were hopeful that we’d be able to start using the account imminently.  Not the case.  A week after we turned in our paperwork, John received another email from the bank manager inquiring how much money we planned to be transferring in from our American account.  In her email, she obviously meant that she had to “preview” it to the “back office” but what she really wrote, in her broken English was that she had to “prevent” it.  Alas, we were finally getting a French bank account but weren’t able to get money into it. 

John did write back an amount that we were considering regularly to be able to pay our rent, etc., but we never heard back from her.  Finally, at the end of August, we emailed to check on our debit cards and checks again.  Hearing nothing, John wrote to someone else at the bank and heard back that the manager we had been dealing with was on vacation.  He said we could come in an pick up our stuff and that everything was all clear.  Of course, we didn’t hear back on this literally until the day after we moved.

The second week of September, John and I made it back to the bank in our old neighborhood and went in and asked for our cards and checks, bringing in the forms that we (John) needed to sign.  The receptionist went through dozens of cards and came up blank.  Sorry, there’s no card.  I suggested that one of the cards should be under my name.  He didn’t register that the first time through, but upon coming up empty handed, he went back and found a card under my name.  Then he found the other (emergency backup debit card) that was under John’s name, but was in a different stack.  (I mention the emergency backup card because even with a joint account, you can only have one debit card.  The second debit card is only for small withdrawals, for example, when you go on a trip and lose your main card.  You can't make payments with it or deposit with it, and it has a very low withdrawal limit.)  Happy that the receptionist had done his job, he tried to send us off, but I really wanted those checks.  He got back up and looked through another several stacks and found a checkbook for me to take home.  John and I were thrilled!  We were all set to deposit some money into our account, but I realized we had forgotten to bring our PINs with us, so we had to go back home first.

We got back to the 6^th arrondissement, got our PIN codes, and went downstairs to the bank branch located literally next door to us.  I plugged the debit card into the machine and looked for the “deposit” command.  There was none.  I looked on every screen and found no way to deposit money.  You could only withdraw or check your account.  I finally gave up and went back home defeated.  A few days later, I asked a friend about this and he told me that only some ATMs allow deposits, not all.  We needed to go back to our branch to ask them which ATMs in the city allowed deposits.

In the meantime, John initiated a 500€ wire transfer from our account in the U.S. to test the waters.  At this point, we didn’t want to put money in to find out we wouldn’t be able to get it out.  After several days, we had a balance!  I wrote my first check for 28€ to the school for class pictures and am waiting to see if it gets cashed correctly.  John also set up a bank payment to the telephone company to pay our cell phone bills, but ran into a problem there.  The phone company had over charged him for calls he made from Germany! 

We did end up making it back to the branch where we opened the account and found out that you can go inside of the bank (when it is open) to make a deposit in the ATM on the inside (there is no teller).  We waited for about 10 minutes to do our first deposit inside the bank at that branch, but there was a guy there depositing bunches and bunches of cash, one at a time, presumably for a cash based business.  We finally gave up waiting.