Banks & Banking

Today we opened a bank account at Deutsche Bank to keep all our euros in. We chose DB because it seemed like a safe, convenient option for us as Bank of America has an agreement with DB regarding withdrawals at their ATMS. Basically, if you have a Bank of America account, you can use a DB ATM without having to pay any international fees or foreign ATM fees. You do have to pay a 3% conversion fee, but this is usually not too bad.

We opened the account mostly because we're worried that the euro is just going to keep growing in strength while the dollar gets weaker and weaker. Might as well convert a huge chunk into euro now and not have to worry about the conversion rate later on.

We also found that we needed to have a German bank account in order to pay rent. You see, here in Germany they have their own credit system using EC cards and they don't use checks at all. To pay large sums of money people usually wire it from one account to another. To pay regular bills like rent, or health insurance, it's necessary to have a German bank account so you can set up regular transfers.

The bad thing about the DB student account is that it doesn't offer much of an interest rate at all. I think it was 0.5%. Awful really. They have accounts that have larger interest but you need to have a residence permit and full-time job for these. The perks of the DB account include: free checking (which not every bank offers in Germany unlike the states where they're DYING to throw free checking your way), free online checking, free wire payments (from one account to another domestic only).

So now that we have German bank accounts it looks like we're one step closer to "living" here and not just being tourists for an extended period of time.