Monkey Businessing my Money

 Trying to settle details for our trip to Vienna, coming up in just two weeks, has humbled me and taught me how puny mere humans are in the face of organizational red tape and computer system controls. It’s not that I haven’t experienced this before, but that I haven’t had so many balls to juggle at once while facing obstacle after obstacle.

 Number one problem when spending time in a friendly foreign country is how to reasonably access money. First, it’s an entirely different monetary system with its own currency that doesn’t have the same value as American money.

 Second, they have a banking system of their own which doesn’t always play nice with ours. Whether one’s debit card will work in a European ATM is questionable. At the very least, one has to ask that question about every debit card.

 In our case, our debit card would probably work, but we’d have to pay the European ATM’s fees ourselves and also pay a 3% foreign exchange fee on every transaction. The fees would add up to a lot over a month-long visit. We decided to investigate the universe of debit cards.

  I used Copilot, my favorite research associate. After reviewing a lot of material—this AI program does overkill on the data dumps IMHO—it seemed that Fidelity Investments had the best debit card for foreign travel. No ATM fees, they cover the foreign bank’s ATM fees, and they don’t charge foreign transaction fees.

  Armed with that information, I went online to open an account and get my debit card. The first snag I hit shouldn’t have surprised me. This wasn’t a Fintech* company: They wanted me to open a regular account before I asked for a debit card. So I did. I transferred a third of the considerable spending money we had set aside to cover all the costs of living in Vienna for a month, feeding ourselves, traveling, buying tickets for things, etc.

 Then I tried to apply for a debit card. Nope. Money had to clear. I’m okay with that. I had transferred cash from my bank, so how long could that take? The next day, the bank told me the money cleared, but Fidelity still wouldn’t let me even apply for the danged card. I called the customer service line and discovered that the money had to “settle” before I could apply.

 What is settling? Even after a lot of rigmarole, I don’t know. Closest I can come is they want to know you’re going to be hanging around for 7–10 days before they trust you with their application process. Bottom line, I could apply for the debit card on October 3.

 Okay, that’s still 10 days before our trip; however, it takes 7–10 business days to get the card after one applies. That puts us well into our departure date of October 14. Gee, what if the USPS has a hiccup and doesn’t deliver on time? So I asked if they could expedite mailing the card. I even offered to pay for the extra cost.

 The agent gave me a wishy-washy maybe and said I could ask again on October 3 when I applied for the card. Oh, no! That’s not going to happen. They have my cash and I can’t get it. I’m highly annoyed and totally stymied, so Monday morning, I did the next best thing. I got in my car and drove to a Fidelity office near me.

Honestly, Deonte—the young man who helped me—couldn’t have been nicer or more patient. He got his coworker in the ‘back office’ on the line and between the two of them, they came up with what we all hope is a solution: a wire transfer. Turns out that money deposited by wire transfer is available for use more quickly than other methods.

 All I had to do was drive to my bank and wire them more of my money with the expectation—but not a guarantee—that I will be able to access it before I leave the country. Oh, and pay my bank $33 for the privilege of doing a wire transfer. Who knew they cost that much! The fine folks at Fidelity also took a paper debit card application that would be submitted the moment settling happened.

 Perhaps we will cross the Rubicon soon. I have done everything as instructed. The bank completed the transfer. Thankfully, I reviewed their documents before they transmitted them and caught the typo in my Fidelity account number (bullet dodged!) All that’s left is to wait for the new deposit to settle and then see when our cards might be processed and mailed.

 Honestly, my gut has been in a knot over this since last week. Three weeks seemed like a reasonable amount of lead time to get the money stuff lined up, but was clearly not. To any would-be travelers, forewarned is forearmed!!

 Fidelity now has a substantial amount of our Vienna reserves. Here’s hoping we can actually use it when we get there.

 Have you ever been caught in this kind of catch-22? How did you resolve it?

 Ciao

 *Fintech is Financial Technology and includes companies like Chime, PayPal, Square, etc. that do monkey business —oops, I meant money business—online.