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Comment by PaywallBuster | Hacker News Reader

I used to have 90% of my money in a bank

Moved to a foreign country during covid

Meantime, the debit card expired, 3 months later when I try to login to mobile app/internet banking, can't do anything without the debit card.

Call the bank to send new one

3 month waiting

Call them multiple times: we can send new one but we'll cancel the one 'in-flight. Do you want to do that or wait another week?'

Eventually I requested a new one, two times

1 year waiting

The last phone call the staff admited they could be getting stolen

I've requested multiple times to send the card by Fedex or DHL they refused to do anything that didn't follow "their process"

A debit card sent by untracked letter!

Meantime they refuse to give me any alternative access to the account, move any money or make any transactions.

Lesson learned, don't trust _ONE_ bank with your savings/banking needs!

Can't be safe unless you have multiple bank accounts, crypto, and some nice friends.

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> Lesson learned, don't trust _ONE_ bank with your savings/banking needs!

This is generally a good advice, as a bank typically has your money and lose nothing being slow or painful.

On moving to foreign countries while keeping banking access, it's such a world of hurt.

Some banks will straight stop your account and flag it the minute they understand you've been out of the country for any specific length of time (from 1 full month to 6 months depending on the bank). Many banks will just not allow a foreign resident to keep an account.

Citibank in Japan has the funniest rule: you have to receive in person a letter sent to your residency address every month if you intend to keep your account alive. Failing to do so for whatever reason automatically locks the account and you have to come to them to prove you still meet their requirements.

> Citibank in Japan has the funniest rule: you have to receive in person a letter sent to your residency address every month if you intend to keep your account alive. Failing to do so for whatever reason automatically locks the account and you have to come to them to prove you still meet their requirements.

While this is annoying and is excessive to what's required in law (it must be done at least yearly, and most banks do not try to annoy foreign residents more than what's legally required), Japan does require all Japanese-domiciled bank that they verify that the owner is either a Japanese national or a long-term resident in Japan. In fact, most Asian countries do have a "must be a citizen or resident" or even the much more stricter "must be a resident" requirement.

At least it's not India, according to Mastercard and Visa India even prohibits foreign long-term residents from maintaining an account in their country of nationality (and therefore we must always certify that upon our knowledge we do not send cards, even debit, to India).

> India even prohibits foreign long-term residents from maintaining an account in their country of nationality

That is very, very excessive... Do you know what the official reasoning is for that?

Taxation(tracking) leaps to mind.

Almost all banks are required to comply with tracking and sharing tax information due to OECD agreement at country level for tax reporting standardization.

It's the default regardless of the country unless you are sanctioned.

It's a factor but only a single one among multiple others.

It's technically not a prohibition, but because the Reserve Bank of India regulates banks and requires a license to deal with anything banking, even if you already have an existing relationship (with other jurisdictions it only penalises marketing into their country which is understandable) with the account holder RBI could just sue us for operating without a licence, and RBI tends to just sue even if you think it's stupid. The resident is never penalised here (unless you have very large stash offshore), it's the bank.

Also, since that some may just scratch their head, here is the relevant provision from MasterCard (https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...).

Just google "India" and "black money". I'm not from there, but it feels like the boogeyman of Indian politics. It seems the government is able to perpetuate some idea that India has simply unimaginable wealth, but that it was all stolen by a select few and if only they could get it back everything would be OK.

It is not prohibited for an individual to maintain a foreign bank account in India but capital controls (FEMA) applies and banks providing services to Indian residents might need to comply with regulatory framework.

It's the same in most countries. The regulatory burden may be different but banking presence is required in the country if you are serving domestic market at scale.

Indian residents can open HSBC expat account domiciled on the jersey island as an example.

Citibank still operate retail accounts in Japan? I thought they sold their retail business to SMBC and its now operated as Prestia almost a decade ago, alongside when HSBC pulled out of retail.

You're probably right, I wasn't a Citibank customer so didn't follow what they were doing these last years.

Citibank left Japan almost a decade ago. You're dealing with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/citi-agrees-sell-japan-retail...

I moved abroad 5 years ago. All my 7 US bank accounts + 2 credit card issuers have my old address as physical, and VirtualMail as mailing address. No problems so far. New cards are sent to mailing address, and virtualmail forwards them to wherever I am.

I'm guessing your old address has friendlies there? Otherwise, how would you get new cards, and mail bouncing can trigger issues.

(In Canada at least, mail can be set for "no forwarding", so the post office won't redirect in said cases.)

VirtualMail is a mail forwarding service. It's like using a PO box for your mail. You still generally need to have a physical address on file with the bank, but you can have all your cards, statements, and other mail from the bank go to the VirtualMail forwarding address and then tell VirtualMail where to send stuff.

citibank does not operate in Japan anymore. And this claim is utterly false. Former citibank client here.

My bad, I never went with Citibank for that reason and forgot they went under.

That's the explaination I got when I discussed opening an account there. To note I wasn't a permanent resident, which might have set different conditions.

Went with Mitsubishi, and they were just fine.

https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/assistance/filecomplaint.html

File a complaint with their regulator and let them know you have.

That was an EU bank

I did contact a regulator body once I got access to my account

1. It was difficult to use unless native

2. They're basically doing mediation, will ask feedback from me and the bank and end with the bank follow their "procedures" so my problem for "being away"

Anyway, now I'll make sure to have multiple bank accounts across multiple jurisdictions

> Can't be safe unless you have multiple bank accounts, crypto, and some nice friends.

You are never 100% safe. You could be killed by a car, a falling plane or a meteorite an hour from now. Or an artillery shell or nuke just after the start of an unexpected war. Or that painful spot that you have could turn out to be terminal cancer, which could kill you within 3 months.

Also any currency and any set of stocks can go to near-zero faster than most imagine. A natural disaster can happen that simultaneously wipes out your house (if you have one) and your insurance company. (This is actually the reason I'm insuring my house with the same company that holds my mortgage, so at least I don't have to pay the mortgage if they're wiped out in such an event.)

The real question is how much risk are you willing to accept, and what costs are you willing to pay to mitigate the risks. And of the above, I think the main risk driver was to go abroad (paired with being unlucky about covid's timing).

Going abroad while depending on a domestic bank with a log-in method that would soon expire was adding to the risk.

The combination of the above put you into a small subset of the population, meaning you and people like you didn't have leverage when the disaster struck.

But you _were_ unlucky. And if luck is bad enough, you're never completely safe.

I don't think its that deep man. There's a huge difference between getting locked out of your bank account, something everyone knows happens, at a place we are all told is the best place to put our money, completely avoidable and way more common than it should be, and getting hit by a meteorite.

It wasn't luck. It was someone's decision making that he was subject to with no recourse.

This is actually the reason I'm insuring my house with the same company that holds my mortgage, so at least I don't have to pay the mortgage if they're wiped out in such an event.

I like this logic.

My only concern would be that, in many cases an insurer might have a clause to pay cash or rebuild, their choice. Or some other conflict which may cause issue with the mortgage holder (many mortgages can force sale in certain circumstances).

But I like your premise, and will poke at it here.

I also try to diversify between currencies (at least EUR/USD/some crypto)( and "asset classes" (stocks/crypto/some sort of business)

stocks are also diversified (different segments of the economy and geographies)

but yeah, unlucky at that time!

Under normal circumstances, would be easy to fly back within 3 months

> This is actually the reason I'm insuring my house with the same company that holds my mortgage, so at least I don't have to pay the mortgage if they're wiped out in such an event.

How exactly do you think this would work? What jurisdiction is all this in?

I live in Norway, and one difference compared to the US is that here a "mortgage" or "house loan" is really a personal loan with the property as collateral. Even if the value of the collateral is destroyed, the loan remains.

So basically my idea is that to have some of my assets (insurance and some savings) with the same company that holds the mortgage, I have a hedge against the credit risk associated with my assets. If the bank goes bankrupt and cannot repay its obligations to me, I can refuse to pay my mortgage back to them, and demand that any net asset the bank would owe me would be subtracted from the liability I have with the bank.

If my assets were in another company, and that company were unable to pay, I would still be stuck with the mortgage, potentially even if the value of the property were to be lost.

As a side not, I remember working on a credit risk (Basel 2) project back in 2005-2006. Until then, inter-bank lending was (by regulators) considered to have zero-none credit risk, but from around that time, banks (at least in Europe) had to allocate regulatory capital when lending to each other. Then came 2008.

I'm surprised stories like this aren't posted more in crypto threads to counter the general HN hate

Been there, now II have 15 cards from 6 different banks.

There is also problem with deposit insurance. In EU deposit in single bank is insured upto 100k euro. If bank bankrupts, you loose anything over that. So it is better to spread deposits across multiple banks, each with 100k euro deposit.

And by aware that many banks are owned by the same group, and use just different brand as front. Insurance is per bank license, not per bank brand.

How often do banks go bankrupt in EU? It must be rare.

Just six months ago, some banks connected to Russia bankrupted (Sberbank...). They were normal EU banks, incorporated in Austria and Netherlands, with EU bank license.

There is also Cypriot bail in in 2013...

I wouldn’t keep over 100k in a bank, anyway. I’d at least put it in a decently compounding mechanism like an infinite banking whole life policy (assuming Europe has such policies) and make it work for me.

It's similar with FDIC insurance. Each account is insured to $250K only. You have a lifetime limit of some amount of payout as an individual from the FDIC.

This info would be even more useful if you would name that bank.

ABN AMRO

Not that it makes a difference, I see their facebook page have 1.6 stars

why don't you tell us what bank you are talking about?

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