you remember this and this.

Well the Euro travelers checks didn't fly for my citizenship, so they sent them back with a request for a draft or cashiers check. I had to go back to American express and trade them for a draft which will come in a few days. I'm not under the gun for time now, so that will work.

Now I can't say I know everything about money and banking, but I've been Fucked every which way by financial institutions in the past and never enjoyed it once. I've also seen a number of exchange rate scams as I've exchanged money in at least 25 different countries. One of my strangest was the guy who kindly helped me exchange money for what seemed like a great rate, in France. When I went to Buy lunch at a street vendor, He was as indignant (as only the French can be!) and mad as hell at the stupid American trying pay him with "worthless coins!"

The new franc
In January 1960 the French franc was revalued at 100 existing francs. Old one and two franc pieces continued to circulate as centimes (none of which were minted for the first two years), 100 of them making a nouveau franc (the abbreviation NF was used on banknotes for some time). SOURCE Yes, he gave me all "old francs" instead of "new francs", making my money go to 1/100th of what it should have been!

Stupid me!!!

So to the point, How does one go from nearly $250.00 to $205.76 without ever even cashing any money?

This is complicated so try to follow the bouncing ball:

Bear in mind that this is important to me to get this done,so I'm not mad, but I would never have done this if it could have been done any other way. First I bought the travelers checks for E150.00 in dollars, that cost nearly $250.00. (A poor exchange rate) I really only needed E129, but of course travelers checks come in set amounts so E150. it was. They got sent back, so I went yesterday to trade them for the E129 draft. First I had to cash them, and in spite of the Euro gaining quite a bit against the dollar since November, the buy rate was .20 euro less than the sell rate. I exchanged them, because I couldn't just void the first transaction, which netted me $205.76. Oops, $44.24 just disappeared despite the fact Euros are worth more now. A $20.00 fee plus the exchange back to Euros for the Draft, $214.26, is another $28.50 I had to pay. Now that's a clever scam if you can do that! The sell rate was $1.3684. I mentioned Euros were worth about $1.48 right now, and she said, "Well that's if you go to a bank, and we aren't a bank!"

I made a payment by phone to a credit card to make sure it would arrive on time, because the mail has been lousey lately, and they charged me $15.00. If I didn't pay that way my interest rate might have gone to 28%, and since all the money is 0% for a year, I'd have been screwed. I guess I just got frenched instead of screwed, but WTF? So how was your week????

Curiouoso* nursing his sore butt courtesey of our wonderful financial system!

BTW, How come when I deposit any amount of money they ask only what my acct. number is, but when I take out $5.00, they want to see my drivers license, my instant teller card and often the address of my first born? Of course I could just go outside and take it from the ATM but that would cost me $2.00. $2 to get my own fucking money!!!!