Financial Perspectives

There’s a couple of the banks here that have offers of FREE MONEY when you open accounts for your kids. Red rag to a bull, of course…. Sadly, Societe Generale operates on a nationwide basis here so there’s only EUR 16 going on their EuroKid account.

However, Banque Populaire are one of the regional banks here with something like a dozen separate banks over France and the local bank is offering EUR 15 per child. Soooo,… nah, ’twas too good to be true: only the local bank seems to have that offer at the moment.

Just about everyone that moves here either has or opens very quickly an account with Credit Agricole. It’s certainly the simplest choice as they’re in every village of any size in France and they also have an English speaking branch in Normandy (you can use their accounts in the other Credit Agricoles without any real bother). It’s also an expensive choice: since they “improved” their computer system a few months back they now charge over EUR 5 per month just for the priviledge of having an account with them. Oh, plus the EUR 40 or so for their debit card. Anyway, you’re looking at EUR 100 a year just to have a very basic account.

Once people are here for a while, they tend to say “WHAT?” to the bank charges and change banks. I’m told that “the” one to go for is currently Banque Populaire where you can actually get a fully operational account for all of €20 per year.

Anyway, we’re doing a little more checking to confirm things then closing all of our personal accounts with Credit Agricole and moving to Banque Populaire (who, in these parts, seem to have branches just about everywhere that CA do).

American Express are weird.

Just before we left I thought that it would be a good time to finally get around to applying for one as I figured that if need be I could just transfer the account over here (although in practice it looks like hardly anyone takes it here). I fired off the application for their blue card (I’m too stingy to pay the money for their charge cards) and it came back “no”. Never thought any more about it until I got the maildrop from William when I found buried in that a “60 second” application for their gold card which was addressed to me at my parents address (which I’ve not been living in for years now). Well, less than 60 seconds later, I’d filled it in for the laugh and off it went. Just got the latest maildrop of credit cards that I’ve not gotten around to changing the address of and what should I find but my brand new gold American Express card!

So you apply filling in your proper address and they don’t give you it. You fill in an address from years ago and they send you an even better card. Weird. Still not very useful in France but it does look very pretty as the whole card is a gold hologram. Oh, and I’ve even got a free sportsbag for applying too!

Simple really… anything and everything to do with money which means how to get it, how to save it and how to spend it.

Whilst we’ll obviously be covering the “how to get it” with an Internet slant, we’ll also be touching on how to get it and get more of it in all kinds of fields along the way.

Under how to save it we’ll be looking at how to save it in banks but also how to save money when you’re buying things too.