The Bank Saga

Financial situations are tricky when you go abroad. Student visas don't allow for employment, so work-study is out. If your student loan is through a school with semesters and your study abroad program wants you to pay everything up front, the money available to you will be extremely lopsided. And then there are the banks and the credit cards, which charge you extra to withdraw money from ATMs (for banks) or use your card in a currency other than dollars. Capital One gets around the fees when you're looking to use a credit card, but unless you're lucky enough to have a bank without an external ATM charge (or you think to change banks to one before you go abroad!) you're sort of stuck when it comes to banks.

I was not one of the smart ones. I did not change banks before I left for Israel, and my bank is one of the worst for charges--$5 for every non-Bank of America ATM withdrawal plus a percentage of the withdrawal for being in a foreign currency. When you're living on $500 a month, that actually means something.

I thought I'd found a solution. I thought I could just open an Israeli bank account, withdraw a ton of money at once from Bank of America, and put it in the Israeli account before I became a pickpocket's jackpot. It should work, right? This is what I thought on my second day in Israel, when I was still jetlaged and clearly not thinking.

Opening a bank account in a foreign country means trusting the bank completely. You sign a bunch of forms without being able to read them and hope that your friendly neighborhood banker is telling you everything you need to know. Something seems weird? Oh, that must just be how it works in this country.

So I opened an account with Discount Bank on the second day of orientation and was told to come back in a week to get my ATM card. I come back and it's not there yet--come back in a few more days, they say. So I come back, get the (activated) card, and am told to come back tomorrow to get my "secret code," as they say here (which, btw, you don't get to change). This is weird, but okay. So I come back, get my PIN and try the card. It doesn't work. The bank worker doesn't understand what I mean, but she does manage to help me fill out the paper deposit envelope so I can put my first ever 200NIS into my brand-new bank account.

I leave and walk back to the Student Village. My phone rings; I'd dropped my wallet at the bank and I had to go pick it up. When I got there, I discovered Warning Sign #1 (which I promptly ignored and chalked up to "this is how it is in Israel"): they had given me one person's ATM card and another person's PIN. So she helped me change that deposit envelope to my account number and told me, "Come back in a week and we'll have your card." One week later, I'm told that I'll get the card in the mail.

At this point I had a whole host of other problems--including an inability to find the mailboxes and the discovery that I was given the wrong mailbox key (thus confirming my theory of "this is how it is in Israel")--which delayed this whole process. At some point, I received an ATM card in the mail. During the first week of break--now the week before Yom Kippur--I went down to the branch in Ramot Eshkol to get my card activated. Once again I tried to use the card and it wouldn't work. The bank worker wouldn't believe me and made me show her, and the ATM ate my card (because apparently that's what the machines do here if you type in the wrong PIN more than three times in a row). Turns out that while this was my card and was my PIN, it was my original card and PIN, the ones that had been cancelled when I had received that other person's card and PIN. "You'll get your new card in the mail shortly," she said. ''And I ordered you a new PIN before we figured this out, so you'll get two PINs. Just try them both and one will be right."

Okay, now this is ridiculous. It's been two months and I still can't get my money from an ATM--which is important because, as I discovered these past couple weeks, while there are many branches of the bank, not so many of them actually contain tellers. (This is doubly important during Sukkot, when the banks are only open for half a day.) The few times I could actually get someone to talk to me, they told me that they couldn't help me; I had to go back to the branch that issued the card. Well, which one? The one on campus where I opened the account, or the one in Ramat Eshkol with actual tellers?

Now classes have started, which means I'm back on campus and that original branch on campus is once again accessible. "Are you sure it's not in your mailbox?" the woman kept asking me when I told her it's been two and a half months already and I have no card. "Are you sure." YES. "Okay, I've ordered you a new card. I'll call you at the end of the week."

Is it just me, or have we come full-circle here? Honestly, I'm about ready to strangle someone. At this point all my money is in that account, and I can't get to it. I'm ready to just close the account and forget about it, but then what would I do with all that money? I'm not ready to be a walking jackpot, and there have been break-ins at the dorms so I can't even hide it somewhere in my room.

Lesson learned: if you don't know the language or the culture, don't open a bank account. Period. It's not worth the risk.

There will be another post about classes once I've had more than two of them.