Foreign Perspectives

There’s a couple of the banks here that have offers of FREE MONEY when you open accounts for your kids. Red rag to a bull, of course…. Sadly, Societe Generale operates on a nationwide basis here so there’s only EUR 16 going on their EuroKid account.

However, Banque Populaire are one of the regional banks here with something like a dozen separate banks over France and the local bank is offering EUR 15 per child. Soooo,… nah, ’twas too good to be true: only the local bank seems to have that offer at the moment.

Just about everyone that moves here either has or opens very quickly an account with Credit Agricole. It’s certainly the simplest choice as they’re in every village of any size in France and they also have an English speaking branch in Normandy (you can use their accounts in the other Credit Agricoles without any real bother). It’s also an expensive choice: since they “improved” their computer system a few months back they now charge over EUR 5 per month just for the priviledge of having an account with them. Oh, plus the EUR 40 or so for their debit card. Anyway, you’re looking at EUR 100 a year just to have a very basic account.

Once people are here for a while, they tend to say “WHAT?” to the bank charges and change banks. I’m told that “the” one to go for is currently Banque Populaire where you can actually get a fully operational account for all of €20 per year.

Anyway, we’re doing a little more checking to confirm things then closing all of our personal accounts with Credit Agricole and moving to Banque Populaire (who, in these parts, seem to have branches just about everywhere that CA do).