Zapping Euros Into the Void
The too-frequent stress of Portuguese money transfers
Hello everybody!
Winter is finally here, and in Porto, that means a mix of crisp, cold days and warmer, rainy weather. Perfect time to put our heads down and get some work done.
Speaking of… here’s what we have in the works this week:
The too-frequent stress of Portuguese money transfers
The beautiful ease of MBWay
Quick hits
Let’s get to it!
The too-frequent stress of Portuguese money transfers
Of the 1001 adulting tasks we performed this week, one of the more stressful was to make a progress payment to our builder.
Professional invoices in Portugal are paid via bank transfer. Every account has an International Bank Account Number (IBAN), and to make a payment, you just log into your bank’s website or app, input the IBAN from the invoice, add an amount, write a description, and hit send.
It’s like a wire transfer but free and instantaneous. Easy, right?
Also like wire transfers, there is no way to check and ensure you’re sending the payment to the correct person. You have to trust that you typed the 25-digit IBAN correctly. If you missed a number and another account exists with that wrong IBAN, your money will go there instead.
Most Americans probably only do a few wire transfers in their life (unless they’re high-rollers or frequent real estate investors). But here, we have to make multiple IBAN payments per month in amounts ranging from our rent to very large construction payments.
Every time we sit down to transfer tens of thousands of euros, we go through a stress roller coaster. Each of us takes turns reading the IBAN aloud to each other over and over to ensure it’s keyed in correctly. “Wait, was that 4 or 5 zeros after the 7?!”
The stress when we click “pay” and hope that we got the IBAN correct (so the right person gets all that money) is very, very real. Just thinking about it as I write this makes certain parts of me clench a bit.
Fast forward to this week, when we paid our very large construction invoice. Hilary and I did our read-the-IBAN-back-and-forth-10-times routine, but it didn’t go through. Our bank blocked it for routine security checks.
The bank called me later to unlock the account and send the transfer, and it happened while I was walking to the lighting store. After answering numerous security questions, they said “Okay, go ahead and try to send it again. You need to do it while we’re on the phone.”
There I was, standing on the sidewalk by myself, nervously typing that 25-digit IBAN into a phone app to zap a massive sum of money off into the ether, a giant pit forming in my stomach. Even after quadruple-checking the number, I was still a stress cadet pressing the “send” button.
Blergh.
To top it off, it’s not even a common thing here for people to contact you to let you know they received your huge payment. You have to just casually go about your life knowing that you’ll only hear something if the euros don’t arrive.
The beautiful ease of MBWay
On the flip side, instead of the myriad transfer options like PayPal, Zelle, CashApp, Venmo, etc… there’s just one, centralized service here. It works for way more things, links directly to your account, and is free.
MBWay is everywhere. You can use it to split checks and share money with friends, like PayPal or Venmo, but you can also pay taxes and utilities, and even make point-of-sale transactions on the same machine where you swipe your credit card. Visa® would never let that happen in the US.
Payments can be made online, via an app (using QR codes or phone numbers), and at ATMs scattered around the country. As an example, before closing on our apartment, we paid our hefty transfer tax at an ATM and brought the receipt to our notary as official proof of payment.
The big difference between the pain of IBAN and the ease of MBWay? When you pay by MBWay, it actually tells you who you are paying, so you can know the money is going to the correct place.
Much lower stress.
Quick Hits
On a walkthrough of our apartment yesterday I noticed a nail sticking out of a board in a spot that was recently demolished. I grabbed it to pull it out (safety first!) and realized that it’s an old, square nail from the original 1939 construction. I can’t say if it’s forged or hand-wrought, but it’s a small token of charm and history that helps offset, if only just a tiny bit, all the extra stress that’s involved in renovating an old, leaky building.
Speaking of old leaky buildings, the torrential rains we’re experiencing are exposing some serious water intrusion into our apartment (that’s getting our nice new insulation, floors, and plasterboards wet). The roof is not 100% finished, but we are beginning to suspect that there may be some issues with the walls we share with our neighbor buildings on each side. Please cross all your fingers and toes for us that it’s the roof and not some new issue that will need to involve multiple homeowners associations from multiple buildings.
This will be my last newsletter of the year. We’re off on an adventure to Malaysia (and maybe Thailand too). See you in 2024!
As they say here: Boas festas, boas saidas, e boas entradas. This loosely translates to: Happy holidays, good endings, and good beginnings.
What are your holiday plans?
This week’s music is a mix between the indie soul vibes I’ve been sharing lately and some UK grime. Check out DARGZ!
Have a great trip!
Happy Holidays you two!