It’s My Money, Just Give It To Me Already!

So today I had to go to the bank to pay my rent, and my mood was not the best because I’ve been trying to do it for more than one week with no success. I’ll explain.

First I asked the caretaker of the house (not really the owner, just the guy that makes sure everything is OK, takes care of the deposits, etc) to give me the IBAN (International Bank Account Number) of the account I should transfer the money to and he told me he would send it by mail. A few days later (and no sign of said email) I called back and it turns out he didn’t have the IBAN in the first place, he just had the “local” account number. I told him to give me that one and I would go to the bank and get the IBAN myself.

Next I needed to find a way to get to the bank before closing time. Like in Portugal, banks (annoyingly) close very early, and if subtract the bank’s opening hours from my job schedule I end up with only half an hour on Friday. That’s the only time in the whole week I can go to the bank! How insane is that?

This gets me to today, and I went to the ATM machine to withdraw the money for the rent. Tried €300 and got the “insufficient funds” message. Well, this had already happened to me once, and I figured out (after a lot of attempts and a phone call to the bank in Portugal), that there seems to be a withdrawal limit of €250 per day, or at least for some unknown time, until some updates are made (the lady with whom I talked to didn’t seem to know a lot about it either). It’s all got to do with security and the delay between the withdrawal and the time when the actual account balance is updated. I had to ask my father to go to the bank and change/remove that limit. Which he did, and he was informed that the limit had been raised and I should have no more problems. But apparently the problem still persists…

I ended up taking the €250 from the damned machine, tried a few others from other banks (to make sure it wasn’t a bank-specific limit) and ended up giving up knowing that it either is my bank’s fault, or there’s some entity that controls these kinds of international transfers and they enforce this ridiculous limit. I lean towards the first option: it’s all my bank’s fault.

The bank is Millennium BCP. I don’t have any other reasons to complain about them, other than the fact that the bank fees are probably higher than in other Portuguese banks. The online banking platform is quite good (in the sense that I always managed to easily do what I need, and not by comparing to others because I never used any), I never had any problems with erroneous transactions, and the customer service is always very good. But this situation is just unacceptable. They always use the “for security reasons” excuse, but I just hate it when security starts being a such a hindrance to the most basic tasks. I don’t care if they make the PIN number 10 digits long for enhanced security. But I do mind only being able to withdraw €250 in a single day!

It seems that they want me to plan my “rent-paying-day” ahead of time, to make sure that in the day I get that magic amount of money from the ATM I still have some money in my wallet to eat and go out if I feel inclined to it. What the hell!? That’s not acceptable! Do I really have to open a bank account in another bank to be able to freely access MY money?!

Anyway, I managed to get the IBAN at the bank and so I’ll be able to do everything online and bypass all the hassle I just described. But I needed to share this, and alert the readers of this blog (yes, all two of them!) to this issue.