Banking

Hey guys! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, been finishing up with midterms. Only have 2 more left in November, so I’m good for this week. I got a lot of mails asking about banking and which banks to choose. So, I decided to write this blog about my favourite bank – RBC!

As you know there are about three main banks in Montreal – RBC, HSBC and TD. They’re all amazing banks with student plans and low monthly charges. What it basically boils down to is proximity, services and their plans.

RBC

I know RBC and HSBC have an awesome student plan where you don’t pay any start up or initialization fees. Plus, you don’t get charges monthly, nor are you swarmed with transaction fees. The only fees you do pay is when money is transferred to your account from another bank’s account. For instance, whenever my parents transferred money from their respective accounts, I got charges $30 - $15 for the transfer fee to RBC and $15 for the bank that sent the money.

It’s kind of stupid paying so much, so what my parents did was send one large sum of money for the year, so I only got charged once. For international students, it’s especially important to watch interest rates on a daily basis, so that when your parents do transfer money, you can save. I know that you can sometimes save about 300$ in exchange rates itself.

RBC has an unseen but important benefit – there are ATMs everywhere. New Residence has one, every mall has about three and the McGill campus has some as well. This basically means that you can deposit and withdraw money wherever you are, without paying any fee. If you’re an HSBC or TD banker, you have to pay a nominal fee to withdraw money from the RBC ATM.

HSBC

HSBC was my second choice, the only reason I didn’t get an account there was because there was only one ATM and one service center – right opposite the McGill campus on Sherbrook. It was a tad bit too far for me and I preferred going down to the lobby of New Residence to take out money there. HSBC has outstanding customer service, in that whatever problems you have, paying bills, online banking, issuing cheques, paying your mobile phone bill, McGill bill – they’ll do it for you, for free, right there and then. RBC has the same plan and you don’t have to wait for more than 5 minutes! I don’t know, but I think that’s really good.

TD

I’m really sorry, but I sadly don’t know much about TD, they’re not that into the student plan as RBC and HSBC are. They advertize like crazy – especially at frosh events, but I don’t know a lot of people who have TD accounts. All I can say is that they have a sweet plan wherein they pay you $50 to join TD. So, the minute you open an account there, you get $50 credited to your account! It’s that amazing? I would have joined, but the service center and ATMs were really far away – and I mean really far – somewhere on Peel and another one on Crescent. I made a lot of daily or weekly transactions, so TD didn’t work out for me.