seegers says...

Today I spent some time to get an overview over my personal finance. Basically I wanted to find out where I have all my money and how much of it goes how frequently where. Years ago, it was easy to tell: Either the money was in my wallet or in my savings account. Then I got older and got a checking account as well. Then a long term savings contract. Oh, shall not forget my credit card. Then another savings account for keep the monthly deposits for the university fees separate. And then there are bunch of web services that are a lot easier to use (or only to use) when you deposit money with them: VoIP telephony, printing stamps... In short: I needed to have an overview to structure my income and to see from what account which payments are deducted.

Afew hours later, I was finally finished (layouting can take quite a while). I even have a nice flowchart to visualize is all. It got 24 items on it.

But after all, I am still a poor student. At least now I know where my money is (not).

Today is the day when they announce the new winning numbers of the Taiwan Receipt Lottery.

At the moment the webpage with the winning numbers cannot be reached. I guess too many people are trying to access it.

PS: Did not win anything. Just almost two times 200NT. I was just one customer too late or should have waited for two others to pay before me...

It can be quite troublesome to pay bills. Especially if you want to pay them, but the company cannot tell you how much you owe them. My phone service provider O2 seems to have such a problem. I have not received any bills for the last two months. After several calls to the hotline and being transferred from department to department, they seem to have/had some technical error and are now working on this issue as well as catching up with sending out the bills. No one has been able to explain the issue to me nor been able to tell me when I can expect my bill. And I would really hate to pay a bill for 3 months (or more) while I am in Taiwan and have no income on my German account.

So of course I call the hotline and try to settle it in advance or to find an alternative solution. The billing department seemed to be especially inflexible and unwilling to negotiate anything. No can do and have to wait till the bill is ready and it is my problem if I am abroad for three months. At least then I got transferred back to the customer service and the lady there was a more helpful. I was not the first customer who called about the problem. After she made some internal calls, it seems that I am ranking higher in priority now and should be expecting my bill before I fly off. If I haven't gotten anything in the next two weeks, I should call again. Not too sure, but maybe this is just a stalling technique... oh well, wait and see.

Well, I told you already that I will be going to Tainan in Taiwan. Lucky me, one of my friends here in Tübingen is from Tainan. So I will be looking forward to get a tour from Patricia in her hometown.

In Tainan, I will be working at National Cheng Kung University and live in one of its student halls, which menas very likely shared rooms I guess. My internship will be at the Lab of Multimedia Human-Machine Communication, which is headed by Prof. Wu. But so far, I have no idea what I will be involved with.

Also I got the written confirmation now as well as my application for the visa and the health insurance. And other papaerwork that I did to prepare was to open a new free bank account, where I can get a free Visa Card to withdraw money from any ATM abroad for free. Oh well, still some more paperwork to come.

A few things can take a while to settle, even though there are certain procedures that provide a solution to avoid a long wait. End of march, I wanted to travel to my hometown on a public holiday. Before I got onto the train, I tried to withdraw some money from an ATM. However, the door-opener refused my card and hence I did not have access to the ATM itself. Since my train was leaving soon, I had to resort to the other nearest ATM, but there I had to pay a fee of 5 Euro since this ATM did not belong to my bank's network.

About a week later, I sent an email my assigned contact person at my bank. In this email I complained about the fee and asked for a refund since it the ATM was not accessible. Also I attached to that email a confirmation that I am still a student and thus to extend my student account there. About three weeks later and without getting any response, I sent an email reminder. And a little while later, the only reaction that I got was a letter telling me that my student status was expiring.

Just great. Apparently my emails have not been received or been ignored. So I prepared a letter with my complaint, attached a note from my university that I am still a student and threw this one into the mailbox of my bank. A week and a few days later, still no reaction, I decided to try to contact my bank through a third way: I left a message/complaint though the web-interface of my account there.

The next day I got a call from quality management. He settled my issue with the fee and promised to get in touch with my assigned contact person about this issue to find out what was going on. He even refunded me twice the original fee that I had to pay at that ATM because of the long wait that I had. I honestly have to say though, that I was more happy that he said that was doing a follow-up than getting more money back.

And apparently, this follow-up was done, because now looking at my account statement, I see yet another refund of that transaction fee. Of course I am happy about more money. Now I got a total refund of 15 Euro for an original transaction fee of 5 Euro. But I still have no explanation of what went wrong and I am not really confident that this will not happen again.

Now I am contemplating to write back that I got already a refund of the transaction and that the second refund can be returned, but that I would like to know what went wrong and how to avoid contacting problems in the future. On the other hand, I would like to keep the money of course. After all, I am just a poor student.

What would you do?

The joy of getting a bigger refund definitely pushed back the lack of confidence that I have with my bank. It is an easy pacifier. But also it simply addresses only the current situation and is relieving its symptoms. But I still have no idea of the cause and I do believe that getting in touch with me to resolve this issue would have created an even higher consumer satisfaction for me.

About a year ago, I opened an account with a new bank and recently I closed my accounts I had with another bank in Tübingen and in Münster. Now I have just one "financial partner" - for the moment at least. It is good feeling to have everything in one place and to get an overview. But then again I have always been a friend of diversification as well.

Anway, being back at home in Münster, I also found my old account records. Even my very first savings book which my parents opened about two months after I was born. And lucky me still found another savings book which I thought I closed when I went to work at Disney seven years ago. So it's last entry was still in DM (Deutsche Mark), well before the European monetary union took place. Having roughly 30 Euros in it, I got over 7 years an interest of roughly 1,48 Euro. Should have looked for better investments, but still nice to find something extra. Should happen more often.

And apparently I used to collect my small change back then already. Especially 1-Pfennig pieces. At least there was a bottle with 990 of them inside my closet. It is worth roughly 5 Euro in nominal value, but I wonder what the scrapmetal price for 2kg copper/steel is nowadays. Anyway, does anyone have another ten pieces for me to complete 1000?