One Thing I Wish I’d Known Before Moving to Aotearoa
It was late May of this year when I uprooted my entire life and left (nearly) everyone and everything I knew to move to a far flung island known to many as New Zealand. To the indigenous Māori people it is known as Aotearoa meaning “long white cloud.” According to Wikipedia, the name was originally used by Māori in reference to only the North Island, the name of the whole country being Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu. Along with settlers from East Polynesia, they arrived between roughly 1320 and 1350 in multiple canoe voyages. That’s a little bit of history you know now — cool, right?
I did all my research like any smart person would: read through the Reddit thread specifically catered to people looking to move to NZ, looked up how to get an IRD number (the number that identifies me for tax purposes), the works. Somehow, though, I missed one critical piece of information.
The entire country’s banks stopped accepting foreign currency and checks as of 2020.
What?!
You might think that’s not a big deal, but it absolutely was in my case.
If you lived in Los Angeles in 2011 and had a Facebook account, you probably heard about Bank Transfer Day. It was an initiative created by Sigurd Christian calling for people to voluntarily switch from commercial banks to not-for-profit credit unions by November 5th, 2011 (Guy Fawkes Day, which, interestingly enough, is celebrated with fireworks here in New Zealand). Since credit unions have a profit motivation that is different from traditional banks, they usually don’t do much risk lending, keeping the money invested in the local community through car and home loans. I was one of the people who switched to a credit union that year and never looked back. The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) claimed that on November 5, 2011 alone, approximately 40,000 people joined credit unions, with credit unions realizing $80 million in new account funds.
Credit unions, however, don’t necessarily have all of the functionality of a commercial bank. Something my credit union couldn’t do when I was moving was an international wire transfer. I was told I could take my funds out as a cashier’s check and deposit it once I got here. Or so they thought.
It took me nearly three weeks to even open up a bank account, for one reason or another, but once I finally did, I had my cashier’s check in hand ready to deposit. My bank teller was a lovely woman named Erica, who happened to grow up in Newmarket, the neighboring town to the rural farm area about an hour outside of Toronto where my grandparents lived my entire life. What a freakishly small world!
Erica shared that because I hadn’t had an account with this bank for at least 3 months (this was Day One), it was not considered a “clean negotiated item” and would take up to a month to clear, and only after being mailed by courier back to the United States in order to determine its veracity. I was in absolute shock. I had already used most of the cash I had exchanged through a foreign currency exchange vendor and would definitely be destitute before a month’s time. Now, I am incredibly fortunate to have parents who can (and did) send me money at the drop of a hat, and a friend I was living with here was willing to front me however much money I needed, but if I didn’t have that kind of support, what would I have done? I shudder at the thought of how easy it is to become unhoused if one doesn’t have a solid support system. Having spent most of my life living in Los Angeles, I’ve seen what can happen to people who find themselves in that scenario, and how homelessness has steadily grown to now epidemic proportions in that particular city.
So, off my check went. I was tracking its movements as best I could because that was basically all my money tied up in one piece of paper — talk about anxiety-inducing! When I took my money out of my account before moving, I ended up chatting at length with the bank manager, Sylvia, who said she was excited for me to go on this adventure and kindly offered me her card, “in case anything went awry.” You better believe I called her and asked for a status update after a couple of weeks had gone by. Her response was to send me an email, complete with a scanned copy of my check, stamped and cashed as of July 3rd by a third-party bank. That said, the money was not in my account here in NZ, so you can imagine my surprise. Did my money disappear into thin air? Who was making interest off of it now? Certainly not me, nor my bank in LA. This process was proving disconcerting to say the least.
I called ANZ. I asked how long I could expect it to take before the money would show up in my account. I was told to contact the teller who had helped me, so I reached out to Erica via email. She reached back out to me a couple of days later after conferring with the International Cheque Clearing Team. As of July 17th, I was told it would take until the 24th for the funds to be released; however, it would be credited to my account on the 26th. I deposited this check on June 16th. It was well over a month before my money made it to me! That check traveled a total of 13,463 miles, or 21,667.21 km (as calculated here). I have no idea what happened in the ether to this money before it “moved” from my credit union in LA to my bank in NZ, but I can tell you that I do not wish the experience I had upon anyone (which is why I’m writing this at all).
The irony of all of this, in my humble opinion, is that while the banking system here is considered far more “advanced” as a result of no longer accepting cheques (in the spelling of the Commonwealth), the system of reconciling with the rest of the world who haven’t yet come up to speed is incredibly antiquated! To paraphrase a wise teacher of mine, Stephen Jenkinson, who wrote the book “Money and the Soul’s Desires”: the more abstracted money becomes, the less control we have over her movements.
While this debacle could have been avoided had I known this information well in advance, I think the silver lining it poses is in the opportunity to inform others of all these fun facts. Onwards and upwards!
