Banking

A major obstacle I had to overcome was figuring out how to pay bills. I thought since I do all my banking on-line in the states that I could use the same account to pay bills here - electronic world right? Silly me. Electronic banking has borders. It would cost a wiring charge of $35 everytime I paid a bill here using my online account from the States. Not a good plan obviously. So I call the utility companies to see if I can put the bills on a credit card. No way. Can I use my checks from my american bank account? No way - they don't accept checks. Huh? All the utility companies are paid through electronic transactions that you can do at the ATM like machines or on-line. Ok, so now I know what those other machines are that won't take my ATM card. But wait Rick and I have a savings account with ING. There are tons of those banks here. I thought I would open a checking account with them and link it to our savings account. No, no, no! our account is an american account. It really is the same bank, sort of. Ok, so I still need a checking account to pay my bills here so I opened the account and had money wired into it. Now to pay the first bill. I was given software to load on my computer to do on-line banking and it is in English. Great! I load the software, no problem, try to pay the bill, problem. All the info on the bill is in Dutch. All the requested info is in english. There aren't really that many boxes of info to match up so I eventually figured it out. At least I think so. Anyway, somebody will be receiving 121 euros in a couple of days. I hope it is the electric company.