Changing Banks

Hello Internet.

Today I finished setting up my new bankaccount. But first, let me start at the beginning and explain why I changed my bank in the first place.

About a year ago I moved to Hamburg, Germany. I had an Account at a local bank in the city where I came from. This bank was belonging to a network, but ATMs from that bank-network are not very spread here in Hamburg. You can find ATMs of Hamburgs most avialable bank on almost every Street, but this Bank charges a fee of 5 Euros when you withdraw money from a foreign bank. So I ended up paying a fee of 5 Euros almost everytime I went to an ATM to get cash.

Another thing is that my bank charged me 11,50 Euro a month, just for account mainentance, which is, in my mind, totally out of place nowdays.

One day, a trainer from my local gym asked me, if I would answer him some questions about retirement provisions. I had no clue, but some some reason I said yes (probably I need to practice to say no). On the third try to find an appointment, I met him as my new financial advisor. I wont tell you what he told me and what be talked about here, ill probably do that in another post, but I asked him which bank he recommends and he said: „ING“.

I did some research about how to organize money and stumbled upon the 6-Accounts-Model and the 50/30/20 Rule. What this is? I will explain that in another Post.

I decided that I wanted to do something similar to the 6-Accounts-Model and what ING offered seemed pretty good: No fees for account-upkeep, no fees for Online-Banking, pure online bank, free visa card, and much more. So I opened a new bank-account with ING.

Quitting my old bank account was fairly easy. One letter to my bank and 2 days of time and my money was on my new account. Well, of course you have to change your payment details with all the services you pay for like insurance, tax, PayPal… if you do it that way.

I could open 3 Accounts with the ING, but as my plans were to manage my cashflow with 6 diffrent accounts, I woll have to look out for another bank. Which if not a bad thing at all, if you think about diversification. At the moment, I got the french Consorsbank and the German 1822direkt in my scope.

I will keep doing reasearch with banks, cashflow management, hiw to build cashflow and I will explain much more in other posts to come. See you next time!