we are still living in a material world

In the midst of a global pandemic* – is that redundant? When pan means global but without a quantifying word it seems to carry less gravitas.

In March of 2020 we boiled down our society to the bare essentials. Basically anything that didn’t feed, heal or clean us is closed.  Meaning our fate rides, largely, on some of the lowest paid workers.  We also created a two tier system in which those with a credit card could, to a certain degree, buy safety.

As a society we are daily, and rightly so, lauding healthcare workers and teachers – oh yeah we had to shut down schools in an attempt to slow this bugger down and this was in the midst of an Ontario wide claw back to education funding. Doesn’t seem like that much of a cost to anyone anymore now does it.

But what about the home care workers who earn low wages and have been forgotten on the PPE distribution circuit? How about the ‘essential’ workers who have employers slow to respond with safety measures and have not monetarily compensated them?  Technically no one has to add excess compensation - there’s no law stating this is the case – but many have stepped up, mostly under public pressure and done so, mainly, I assume, to assuage staying-a-home CEO’s what I hope is crippling guilt. (Yeah, yeah I know that’s not what they are feeling but it makes me feel better if I think they are.)

And the pinnacle of a mostly online world? The credit card. Without one navigating our current world is tough. It means shopping in store. It means not having some things just because you can’t access them.  The recent shut down of pet food stores meant a strange bit of transaction over a weekend. Fortunately this story has a great ending. The pet store I use, Global Pet Foods, had stated on their site that eTransfer and PayPal were a payment option. A lovely soul answered my emails and confirmed payment on a Sunday night at 8 p.m. so that I could go pick up the food on my day off that week. But if they hadn’t offered that service I guess I would have had to go purchase a prepaid credit card, in a store, to make that payment. Which would mean another potential exposure. And that’s what I mean when I say a credit card buys safety. 

It’s my personal opinion that we’ve reached a point in our technology where if you have a bank account you should be able to purchase things online. Of course that gets into a huge discussion of internet security and bank fees. I’m not going there except to say, banks, massive profiteers already, really need to be legislated to allow anyone a no fee account.

Veronica Mars fans will recognize “normal is the watchword”. We’re in the midst of a radical change to what used to be normal. And some of it will be painful. Some of it might be amazing. But we have a lot of discussions to have from Basic Income to better pay for everyone to whether or not we hug people. As the old adage says...

*Merriam- Webster defines pandemic (noun) as ‘an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population’ so i guess to answer my own question yes and no. A wide geographic area is not necessarily the globe. But it could be.

so you want to divorce your bank?!

Oh.  My.  God leaving your bank is difficult.  After *cough years with one of the blue banks, I started to feel that my faithfulness and invested money maybe wasn’t getting the best treatment.  And so I started shopping around and discovered all sorts of free chequing accounts available and perhaps even worse that my own bank was waiving fees for those with multiple accounts – like me.  But not like me because nobody ever mentioned this offer to me.  In spite of the fact that they telemarketed me at least three times a week and didn’t leave a message.  Needless to say after banking at the same place since I was a teenager, I decided I was done.  I walked my butt over to one of the red banks and signed myself up for a new free chequing account.  Then I started moving all the prearranged payments company by company to the new account.  Then I moved my RSP.  Then I applied for a line of credit.  Then I waited. 

At this point it’s been almost 8 weeks and we’re still waiting on some of this and honestly, it might be easier to divorce a spouse than a major financial institution.

First, it takes you about 3 pay cycles to figure out what comes out of your account and when.  Or at least it did for me.  Then it takes each of them about 3 weeks to move these so you need another pay cycle to confirm that the move was made.  So I get paid bi-monthly.  If I remembered on the 13^th that something came out of my account on the 15^th, and I called to make new arrangements, because I remembered so late, it took another month to confirm that everything was hunky dory. 

Secondly it takes 4 to 6 weeks and some paperwork to move an RSP.  And dealing with a venue-less bank means you do all of this over the phone and (eek) fax.  And if you’re like me, they keep sending your confirmations to your misspelled e-mail address.  Which is almost like not sending them at all.

You will have to remember and repeat a lot of things about your financial life to many people many times.  Have you ever missed a bill payment? Answer ‘Never’, ‘Occasionally’, ‘Often’.  So there’s no point in fibbing because you’ve just given six people permission to pull your credit report, but honestly the only answer reasonable is ‘Occasionally’ because yes, I probably forgot to post a payment once or twice in the 20 odd years I’ve had to pay a bill.

You will also learn a few new idiosyncrasies of your new financial institutions.   Among them PC Financial makes it so difficult to set up a credit card password that, if you’re like me, you will forget it instantly completely eradicating its effectiveness.  And if you are on hold with ING as much as I have been of late you will notice that they play only songs with the word ‘Money’ in them on their hold music.  It’s actually quite entertaining.

Finally, you will have to toggle between two institutions until this is completed because otherwise you’re just writing cheques to yourself and having to go into the bank branch – which I have spent the better part of *cough years avoiding.

Hopefully all this malarkey will be over shortly as soon as move the last of the balances over to one of my 

two new red institutions and finally give the blue bank the one finger salute goodbye.

I have a bottle of bubbly on ice for when this absurdity is finally over.  And other one for the un-cabling of Rogers.  Which is next.  But not for awhile because if you’re like me, there’s only so much of this you can take.