Health Homework (36a) Don’t put your money in a Spanish-European bank because they could block your access for four years or forever

Narrative: As a legal resident of Spain and Europe, I/we have had Spanish bank accounts for the past 11 years. Speaking as an American (from Generation X, which had the expectation of some level of competence and awareness), I can hardly believe the level of incompetence and inefficiency we have observed in Spanish banks – and apparently it’s a national and systematic problem because I’ve seen it throughout various regions of Spain and also in different banking systems, ie, it’s not one bank in one location, but it’s all the banks that we’ve been to and all of locations that we’ve lived in throughout Spain.

Spanish banks (as I later learned) are famous for stealing money in order to increase their profits and avoid bankruptcy:

The great Spain robbery: Pensioners protest as they watch their life savings vanish into the banks' black hole— “…outside the main offices of Bankia in Madrid. The struggling lender, which posted a record €19.2bn (£16.3bn) loss last year, became the ultimate symbol of Spain’s financial crisis when it had to be bailed out twice, having wiped out the investments of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. The government has shifted Bankia’s toxic property assets into a so-called “bad bank”, allowing it to crawl back in profit since the first quarter of 2013. But for those who lost their savings, most of whom are pensioners, there has been no let up. “We were deceived again and again, we ended up with something we never wanted, and we want our money back,” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-great-spain-robbery-pensioners-protest-as-they-watch-their-life-savings-vanish-into-the-banks-black-hole-8921419.html

Strategies and tactics: Here are some of the strategies and tactics and lame excuses used by Spanish-European banks to block you from having access to your own money, even when you have a legal right to your money and plenty of documentation showing that your money is legit:

1. They will tell you that you’re missing some obscure piece of documentation that may not even apply to your reality or existence.

2. They will tell you that they “cannot confirm your identity“ even if you’re sitting in front of them with two passports and a European residency permit card, all of which are internationally recognized legal identification documents.

3. They will tell you that they had to block your account because they don’t know how to “categorize your work status.” This is what happened to us at the Santander bank and they blocked my account for four years because the employee was completely incompetent. SEE VIDEO ABOVE.

4. Electronic appointment system will say that they cannot find your account even if you had the account for at least 11 years.

5. They will tell you that they cannot update your contact and identification information because the computer system won’t allow the employees to do so. Then later when your information doesn’t match up correctly, they’ll tell you that they have to close your account even though you’ve petitioned them endlessly for years to update your identification and contact information.

6. The bank/credit cards will stop working spontaneously so you can’t use your account.

7. The electronic booklet that goes along with your account will also fail to work when you need it to work.

8. They will close the bank branch, eliminate your personal agent and then relocate your account to a branch that only has one employee who refuses to see you without a private appointment, but that same employee will refuse to make any appointments so you’re effectively blocked out of your account.

9. They will close most of the bank offices, and a few that are open will refuse to give you cash. So by this point in the story, your card doesn’t work, your booklet doesn’t work and you cannot get cash out of the bank account.

10. At this point, you’ve hired a local attorney who speaks three languages, hoping that this will help, but when you go to the bank, the employees fight with your attorney to the point that she tells them that the only positive outcome from the experience is knowing that they will live miserable lives due to their incompetence and mistreatment of their clients and citizens.

I told you previously what my banking strategy is, but certainly a big part of it is avoiding Spanish/European banks.