Wednesday 20 April 2011

It's All About The Benjamins

I am reminded of a quote from a great philosopher of the last century...a man by the name of B.I.G. He wisely said, "I don't know what they want from me, it's like the more money we come across, the more problems we see."  Alternatively, I am also reminded of the slightly less profound L.F.O. words of wisdom, "When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets."  Truly genius...

                                            The "L" stands for (en)Lightened

I should point out here that although BIG's quote does have some relevance to our financial troubles, I am in no way claiming to have rapper cash.  There will be no pimped out rides, trick ass bitches, bling bling or crystal sippin' in this article, just the sad truth of how complicated dealing with moving your money overseas can be.

This article is truly a unique opportunity for me to write about things that I truly (and I mean truly) know nothing about. It's amazing that even after having a financial adviser for over three years now, and having said financial adviser explain everything we are doing financially ad-noseum, I still no nothing about our finances....I consider it a talent.

I did however still manage to play an intricate role in a few of the financial matters we had to clue up.  These included;
  1. Rearranging all our investments
  2. Figuring out how we were going to be paid in France
  3. Getting a French bank account
  4. Trying desperately to understand anything CIBC was telling us...
Rearranging our investments was actually not very hard with Sarah's (the aforementioned financial adviser) help.  Then again, as I suggested earlier, it was entirely dependent on my being able to sign away our investment money with what I am going to optimistically call a 25% understanding of where it was going and why.  I strongly recommend financial advisers for this reason, they will drag you into smart investments even when you could never make a smart investment in your life.

The next three items on our list were all interconnected (as we found when we were trying to figure out anything to do with them).  We needed to know where our money would be going in France in order tell Total where the money would go...we needed to know if CIBC could transfer money either online, through a phone call initiated wire transfer, or hell...we would have settled for delivery by carrier pigeon...we needed to know how Total would pay us and if they would pay into CIBC or our French account (BNP Paribas)...and to top it all off, we needed to have an address and phone number (In France!) for all of this to be set up.  Hello people, we haven't moved to France yet!!!  How the hell can we have an address and phone number...

I actually had a conversation with a person at CIBC that went something like this...

Eric: "Hi there person claiming to know things about banking, geography and life on this planet, I am moving to France soon and need to know how to make a wire transfer into my CIBC account every month."

CIBC Bank Assistant (I will call her Shirley): "Oh yes, I know exactly what you need, let me find a bunch of forms for you to fill out for 45 minutes without explaining anything to you..."

...45 minutes later...

Shirley: "That was a great 45 minutes, now with all that paperwork filled out you will just have to come into this branch every month to initiate the wire transfer."

Eric: "Great, thanks for the...Bwaaaa???  You do know that France is on another continent right?  I will not be able to come in every month..."

Shirley: "Oh...well...hmmm...we can't help you sir."

                                                        And Thennnnnn???

Needless to say, we did eventually figure things out by finding out that Total would actually pay us money into our CIBC account (for our investments) and into our BNP Paribas account (for our foldin' money).  It was a headache without parallel to figure out though...

So, when all was said and done we did actually manage to figure things out...or at least we think we did, we haven't actually been paid yet after all.  Rest assured, you will hear more if something goes wrong.

1 comment:

Lori said...

If you want, you can deposit all your money into my account...I swear I won't spend much of it!!!