Jay wrote:
a401cj wrote:
folks,
buying, selling, and banking are far easier in the US than anywhere else on the planet. That is a fact
Hah! Then why can't you do the kind of easy wire transfers we have in Germany? Buy something on Ebay, just push the money into the other guy's account. No fees, no Paypal, no dodgy 3rd parties, simple. Takes two days to clear.
I tried to wire my dad some money (to a Canadian branch of a US institute.) My bank said no problem, just get us this and this information from your dad's branch. My dad's bank at first had no clue what I was trying to do, then said they didn't have that facility, then finally wanted to charge a $35 "receiving fee" for frigging two lines of computer code. I ended up bringing him cash, in Euro, the next time I saw him, and he went to some money changer who gave him a better rate than the bank would have. Sorry, but the North American banking system is beyond asinine.
Last I heard you guys still sent cheques around in the mail? Yeah, I can see why.
+1. The banking system here in the UK is far from perfect (bank/wire transfers have only recently become more common, for example) but at least people mostly stopped sending cheques around. Mostly. And if you're with a bigger bank, you can usually transfer money to another account with another big bank within two hours.
I love receiving fees, too - for me they fall under the classic "because we can fee" envelope. I have to send my wife the monthly bill money and given that our experience with Paypal is a little less than stellar, I send the money using my UK bank's international transfer system. So I pay a fee and I pay for the conversion into $ via the exchange rate and they still charge her $12 to receive money that's coming from the US branch of another bank and has already been converted into $.