Reply #180: no job, exiled from the u.s., got screwed by the bank, and got robbed last night

[Capitalocracy]

if it's a competition

I've been trying to scrape together a living doing freelance work, translation, transcription, making chainmail jewelry, that sort of thing, but I haven't had much luck. It's been very slow. I am doing some transcripts/captions for The Young Turks now, which is awesome, but again, it's only occasional work.

Here's my situation: I met a girl from Argentina online, fell in love, and moved to Argentina 5 years ago. Before that, I was working for $7 an hour watching the news and writing down all the stories covered (to put it succintly) and it was very difficult saving the money to come here.

Then I had a little problem with my bank account. When I opened the account at US Bank, I specifically asked if it was possible to overdraft using my ATM card, and they told me it was impossible. At the time my dad was depositing money for me occasionally, so when I checked my balance in the ATM machine and it said I had x amount of money, I obviously assumed it was true and withdrew it. Later I found out that I somehow didn't have money in the account, and now owed the bank $590 and had my account suspended.

Recently I tried to open a new account, because I've been doing transcriptions through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which only pays you by direct deposit to a bank account in your name. OK, they wouldn't let me open a new account because I still owed this money. At great effort, I managed to earn the money to pay off the debt through various odd jobs paid through PayPal to my mother's account because the banks told me that I would be able to open a new account once I paid off that "debt".

Not so simple. Apparently, even though I've paid off the debt, it still leaves a bad mark on my record. The bank I was applying to, which had previously said it should be OK after I paid off the debt, is saying they can't open an account for me, and they doubt any other bank will either. I just found out yesterday, so I still have to try other banks starting Monday, but if what they told me is accurate, the sentence for overdrafting your account through an ATM machine that claims, when you ask and pay for your account balance, says you have money: SEVEN YEARS ineligible for opening a bank account.

And I have $500 in my Mechanical Turk account that I may never be able to access now (well, maybe in 7 years). And the same day that I found this out, I got robbed on the street at gunpoint here in Buenos Aires. Why did they rob me? Because I'm obviously a foreigner, and therefore rich. I had the equivalent of about $1, my wife had a little more luckily, and we don't have cell phones. And you see it on the news here all the time, if they rob you and you don't have money, quite often they shoot you.


Oh, and if you get a job here, it'll pay about $300 a month, full-time, and cost of living is similar to any small city in the U.S. And if you're wondering why we don't go to the U.S. and try our luck there, I can't sponsor my wife as an immigrant because I don't meet the financial requirement. I would have to earn $1600 a month to do so, far more than minimum wage.