Banks!

The fundamental problem with blogging about things that happened weeks ago is that I don't remember the details. As such, the story of how we chose a bank will be brief, and lacking in the depth and detail of our shipping story, the irony being that the choice of bank will probably have a greater impact over the long run.

The three main banks we've seen around Haifa are Leumi, HaPoalim and Discount (or, as I pronounce it in my head when I just read the Hebrew - DiscoNet). There are plenty more out there too, it's not like health care where there are four big names and that's it. There's zillions.

There is a Leumi branch literally next to our house, and there's a HaPoalim branch in Ziv, the nearest commercial intersection. We first checked out HaPoalim, and then checked out Leumi. We were kind of hoping we'd like Leumi better, since it was so close.

However, we liked HaPoalim. People advised us to not get too bogged down trying to choose a bank based on who gives you the better deal, down to the shekel. Rather, they said, look for a bank that has good hours and service. Although the hours were more or less the same, the HaPoalim branch is a large building with many people working. There is an orderly number system, and you get to see someone quickly. Our lady was very nice, and answered all our questions. She had a very clear pamphlet that outlined all of the costs for various transactions at the bank.

Leumi, on the other hand, was a small branch. There were only two people working, and the guy we spoke to was kind of tired and impatient. There was no system for getting a number that we could see. So we went with HaPoalim.

The accounts themselves were pretty much the same at both places. Because I am a student, both Rachel and I were able to get student bank accounts. We were told in both places that the benefits for students are much better than the benefits for עולים חדשים.

As for the fees.... so far there haven't really been any. We heard stories about Israeli banks charging fees for every little transaction, but we haven't felt it. The student bank account lets you perform most normal transactions without any fees, and you can always do things like go online to check your account, and things like that for free. You have to pay for a checkbook, but so far the only time we ever write checks is paying the rent, so if we have to pay 8 shkalim for every 25 checks we write, we don't really care.

Supposedly the fees come out when you start doing things like transferring money from the US into your account here, or vice versa. We haven't done much of that, and there are ways around it.

As a nice bonus, we each got two gifts from Bank HaPoalim - a backpack and a spiral notebook whose front cover is a red leather-enclosed calculator. How cool!