HOW: The Currency Exchange Dance, Or

Let's talk about money

Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash

Cutting to the chase: the one thing I would have done differently, so far, would be to have set up currency exchange account and exchanged a bulk of our funds before we left the US.

There were a lot of reasons why we didn’t do this—we were still adding to the final amount; it wasn’t at the top of my list of things to do before we left. I assumed it would be easy enough to do once we got to France. I researched currency exchange companies and made sure we’d have the documents we would need to set up an account, so that we’d at least be able to do that, in country. But it would have been much easier if we’d have just done this before we left.

Why? In a word, American banks aren’t great with international wire transfers.

We have accounts at two national and one local bank. We had the bulk of our funds at one of the national banks, and we’ve also had an account with another one which we rarely used. Both made it very hard to send international wire transfers to Lumon, our currency exchange partner (Lumon, however, was lovely throughout). The local one we didn’t even try, because there wasn’t any information on the web page that mentioned they even did wire transfers.

(I’m not going to name either of these banks in the interest of not broadcasting our banking information far and wide, but if you want to know, just message me.)

In order to wire our funds to Lumon, the first national bank, where we had the bulk of our funds, required us to fill out an extensive form and then fax it to them, during US business hours. Unfortunately, we neither had access to a printer nor a fax machine.

Ok, we thought. We’ll just transfer our funds from that national bank to our other one and send the wire through them.

Not so fast. That bank required you to make an international wire transfer IN PERSON. Obviously it was too late for that. Back to the first bank.

We emailed a copy of the form we needed from the first bank to a copy/business center in Castres. It took two tries to get it printed but we finally did. Then we asked if we could fax from there.

The lovely woman running the business center looked at us like we had just asked when the next train was leaving for Mars. “Non,” she said. “Non fax.”

In our broken French, we asked where else we might go to send a fax. She shrugged. “Not in Castres. Try Tourist Office?”

We inquired at the Tourist Office and they gave us the same answer. Next, I asked Dennelle if it would be possble to send or bring her the document and she could fax it from her office in Montpellier. Yes, we were willing to drive two plus hours to Montpellier from Castres to send this fax.

Unfortunately, Dennelle did not have fax capability either. “You’re going to have a hard time finding a fax machine in France,” she said. However, she did have an answer. (Dennelle always has an answer, which is one of the reasons why we love her.) Apparently, her husband, who works in IT, was aware of apps that would send a fax for you. All you had to do was upload the document.

Hooray! We downloaded the app—Ease Fax for the win, you can pay as you fax—and sent the bank the meticulously filled out form they asked for in order to wire the funds. Crisis averted!

Not so fast, part II. We were told that it could take up to ten business days for the money to be wired. That was cutting it close; we had to pay our deposit the day after. But we didn’t really have a choice.

Over those 10 days we watched our account. And watched our account. Every day. The money wasn’t going anywhere and we were becoming increasingly concerned. About 5 days into the 10 days, we got an email from the bank’s international wire desk saying that they did not have the “intermediary bank information” and could not process the wire without it and if we did not call them THAT DAY with that information, our wire would be cancelled (but we had to wait until afternoon, when they opened in the US).

We did not even know what the intermediary bank information they were talking about WAS. But we found out quickly when we contacted Lumon, who gave us the information and told us they hadn’t thought the bank needed it and if they did, they could have looked it up themselves.

Never mind. We sent the intermediary bank information immediately, crossed our fingers, and started watching our bank acount again.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And then, at 1 am on the Friday we were moving from Castres to Beziers, I got a phone call from the international wire desk at the bank. We had worked with this person a few times and she knew our case.

“Hi, I’m about to leave work, but I’m just calling to let you know that your wire transfer was cancelled. Apparently, as you were giving us the additional information, the wires got crossed and they were cancelling the wire at the same time.”

“We need those funds asap to pay our deposit,” I said groggily. “What should we do?”

“Nothing now,” she said. “We’re closing. But this afternoon, when we’re open, you should probably send a new fax to try to do it again. I just wanted you to know.”

At one a.m.. When I couldn’t do anything about it.

Needless to say, sleep eluded me as I imagined our whole endeavor going up in smoke because we couldn’t pay the deposit on the house. Perhaps I was overthinking it but at the same time, it was hard not to worry, especially after being woken from a sound sleep, that this bank might never be able to wire our own money for us. How long was the seller willing to wait for us and our bank to get our acts together?

We made a coffee-fueled drive to Beziers, where I unpacked my laptop (and the rest of our stuff) and immediately uploaded another wire transfer fax. Unfortunately, I had to wait another two hours for the wire desk to open to confirm it. The bank opened at 7 am but the consultant I spoke to recommended waiting until 9 am CST to speak to someone more “official” because otherwise our transfer “could get lost in the shuffle.”

Yeah, no. Wasn’t risking that.

While I waited, I sent another email explaining the situation to Dennelle and asking her to plead our case with the Notaire and the seller for an extension for paying the deposit, even though I couldn’t exactly answer the question, “Ok, so when do you think you will be able to pay it?”

Long story short, the fax worked this time and the money was wired in 2 days; not the 10 days they had told us to expect. We have since wired the rest of the funds with no problem and just as quickly.

But alas, if we had just looked into the process of international transfer before we left and done some of it in the US, we could have saved ourselves some serious hand- wringing.

It was a tense few weeks. We tried to stay calm and hopeful; at the same time, we had a nagging worry that some technicality was going to derail something we’d been working diligently on for more than a year. We began starting sentences with, “IF this all works out,” just because we didn’t want to jinx anything.

I’m not going to lie. This wasn’t the first time we had an “oh no,” moment. There were some serious hiccups with getting our house sold during which I thought, “are we even going to be able to do this?”

(tl, dr our first buyers put it under contract twice, for a total of 3 months, with the full knowledge that they could not actually buy it, letting two different closing dates whizz by. Before the second contract, we required a deposit to be made to the closing company. We discovered after the second forfeiture, when we were saying, “at least we have the deposit to help with paying bills on two houses,” that they never made this deposit. Happy to share their names and the names of their realtor with you, if you ever need to know who to avoid in Central AR real estate, especially since the buyers have since become agents for the crooked realtor.)

The truth is, whenever you have a project with a lot of moving parts, the possibility is always there there that something is going to gum up the works and you’re going to have some stress. All I can recommend is to remain as calm as you can and stay the course. Give yourself a few moments to freak out and then get back to it. You know all the cliches. Hang in there and it will be worth it in the end.

But wire some of your funds into a currency account before you leave the country.

(Pledge note: Thank you again, to new pledgers! Receiving them has been an unanticipated joy! Reminder that anyone who pledges by July 23 will receive a French Care Package, curated by me, each September, and that Founding Pledges will also receive a French themed book, hand picked by me. Your choice of fiction or non-fiction. )

Coming up next: Old Things Part III—Brocantes!