Day In The Life of Baz

Introduction

Just for review, for the new readers: I’m not from around here :-). I’m from a small Caribbean country called Dominica. I moved up here for school in fall of 2003. That in it self was no small task. It basically took three years or saving and a huge ass loan from a bank back home. That loan didn’t even cover three years of school for me, but nonetheless it’s an exorbitant amount of money. I have 6 and a half years left to pay it off. If my calculations are correct, that brings me to a nice figure of US $29887.64. Let’s just round it up to and even 30 grand. While I was up here going to school and being broke it was up to my parents back home to pay the interest on the loan (those were the agreements). They’ve worked extremely hard to get me where I am (was) and I appreciate it.

Since I’ve gotten a couple paychecks since I started, I’ve been able to knock down some local debt I have up here: stuff I racked up when the last semester was over and I could no longer work on campus, moving expenses (apartment deposits, applications fees, etc), and miscellaneous work expenses (work clothes mainly). As such, I’ve been trying to find a way to express my appreciation to my parents in the form of some much needed cash to pay the principal payments on the loan, which are about $360.00 a month. The problem is finding a reliable way to send that money back home to my mom so she can pay the bank.

Option One: Deposit Straight To The Bank

This was my first option because it made the most sense. So this is what I was trying to get information about. My search didn’t last too long when I was discouraged. I was told that other people in my situation haven’t had great results with Option One. “Why not?”, I asked. Apparently, some deposits have mysteriously gone missing or the amounts sent and the amount deposited disagreed for some odd reason. This gave way to:

Option Two: Deposit To Mother’s Account

Slight variation of Option One, so we’re still on the same track. So I continued investigating the intricacies of international wire transfers. This is my understanding of the explanation I was given:

When transferring internationally the foreign bank has to have a contact bank locally. Money in wired to this contact bank with instructions for further credit to the foreign bank and the account information of the recipient at the foreign bank. Now these wire transfers are slightly different from local transfers. Local transfers just need a routing number and an account number, much the way regular checks work. International transfers require account numbers, ABA numbers, and swift codes.

I got my mother to send me the information from her bank back home. I received the account number (my mom’s) and the swift code for her bank and the name, address, and swift code of the contact bank, in New York. I printed all this out and hopped over to Wells Fargo to send some cash. So I kept feeding the teller information and she told me that I need an account number for the contact bank. I said “I’m sorry miss, but I don’t have one. This is all the information they gave me”. She tried to explain why I needed an account number. Since she didn’t really understand the international transfer process herself, she didn’t do a great job. After about 15 minutes I got a perfect explanation from her: She was entering the information on a computer using they system software or whatever and it wouldn’t let her go to the next screen without an account number. As a programmer, this I completely understand. Now since Wells Fargo uses a central software package for all their branches, I decided to trust the software.

So I called up my mom that night and told her I need an account number. A few days later she sends me an email with all the information again and an account number. Excellent…almost. There was an account number, however the ABA number was different from before. Not knowing which was correct, I had to question all the information.

I decided to just call up the bank myself to get the information. This was an interesting experience. I got all of my information verified, except an account number. All of a sudden, this was privileged information. But what was really funny was their solution. They recommended that I call the bank in New York to get the account number. This is like me calling up Bank of America, or someone, and saying: “I’m trying to send some money to John Brown, what’s his account number again?” What I didn’t understand is that they gave out this account number to my mom a couple days ago. Go figure. After a number of calls, disguised voices, and various lies I got the account number.

The next day I was on my way to Wells Fargo to do that damn thing. Got to the counter, started giving out information, feeling good, everything was going great. While the teller was typing I was just trying to make some small talk and eventually said “So how much is this going to cost?”. That answer broke my whole world. It was going to run me $35.00 to send any sum of money. Now that would be great if I was a young entrepreneur sending hundreds of thousands of dollars. But $35 to send$500 every month didn’t seem quite what I was looking for. So after many wasted days, calls, and trips to the bank, I dicided to move on to:

Option Three: Western Union

We’ve all seen the ads. Send money fast. This option was thwarted by one phone call. It would run me $41.00.

Option Four: MoneyGram

Just about ready to give up, I went to Google (should have known better, this should have been my first choice) and searched for International Transfer. I stumbled upon MoneyGram. First thing I checked what whether they had locations in Dominica. Did a quick look up and that was confirmed. After learning from my experience at the bank I quickly looked up the fees. They don’t have fixed fees (that I could find) but they did have a calculator where you enter your location, destination, and the amount you want to send. For my $500.00 it was gonna cost me a whopping $9.99. Wow. So I’m thinking this is going to take a couple of weeks to clear. Nope. It takes about 10 minutes, 20 on a bad day. Needless to say, I was ecstatic. I decided to be real lazy there is eMoneyGram. This I can do from home, at my computer, in my boxers. There are two different fees though (well at least for the amount I wanted to send). $20 would take 3 to 5 business days and $31 would get me 10 minute service. Ummm, I think I’ll pass. After all one of the closest MoneyGram locations is in place I go so often, Walmart.

Finale

So, option four it was. I walked in to Walmart today, went to the customer service desk, filled out a form, swiped my debit card and was on my way. To add to the good news, there is some sort of MoneyGram saver’s card which I applied for and that knocked down my fee by a buck. Hey, I can’t complain, I love MoneyGram. It sure did feel good to make my first dent in that 30 grand loan and give my mom to spending money.

Popularity: 11%

Share This

Similar Posts

• None Found