Paying bills

Forget summer camps where you must pay in full before a space will be reserved for your child. When you sign your child up for the city-subsidized day camp in Freiburg, the camp organization generously assumes you will pay your bill at some point, and they send you an invoice with your registration materials.

But...you cannot pay your invoice with a credit card. Germany has made the shift from credit cards to the EC debit card; only big touristy businesses take credit cards now.

Nor can you pay your invoice with cash. Your correspondences with the camp are all by mail or telephone and are for registration purposes only, not financial transactions. And you cannot pay your invoice with a check. Germans don't do checks.

Instead, you pay your invoice using the Ueberweisung (money transfer form) that came with the camp registration materials. The Ueberweisung includes the payee's business name and bank account information. You fill out the Ueberweisung with your name and bill reference number; then you take it to your bank, and your bank pays the bill for you. So it's kind of like paying with a check, except that you have to interact directly with your bank every time you want to pay a bill.

What do you do when you don't have a local bank? Stefan's bank in Munich recently started offering online banking. Fortuitously, our list of PINs arrived in the mail yesterday. For every Ueberweising you want to pay, you use a different PIN, until your PIN list is used up; then you ask the bank for more PINs.

Despite the arrival of the PINs, we cheerfully thought "hey, let's handle this one the easy way." The Ueberweisung for Elias's camp was issued by a Sparkasse bank, so this morning I walked to the Sparkasse bank on the corner. I went bright and early, because I already knew Sparkasse banks close at noon on Wednesdays, and I carried two crisp 100 Euro bills along with the completed Ueberweisung.

But you are not supposed to think "let's make this easy" in Germany. The Sparkasse likes account numbers; it does not like cash. Eying me questioningly, the teller informed me that even though their client had issued the Ueberweisung, without my own Sparkasse account, there would be a hefty 5 Euro charge to complete the transaction. Not to be deterred, I agreed.

She had me sign and date the Ueberweisung. So far so good. Then she asked for my address and jotted it down above my signature, although the Ueberweisung specifies not to include street names or zip codes. Hmm. She asked for my identification card. I hadn't brought one. She consulted with a co-worker, who frowned and tutted, and I was told I could not pay with cash without an ID.

I like to imagine this practice stems from a past era when unscrupulous criminals regularly stole and paid other people's bills, but I think instead it has something to do with German thoroughness. Time to go online.