Banking has always felt like a heroic quest

Have you ever been called ‘whimsical’ twice in one day?

I don’t know about you, but every time an article comes with a voiceover bar, I can’t help but click on it. What does this person actually sound like? What melody do they add to their words? I mentioned to the lovely

Elaine R. Frieman

how listening to an author’s voice makes a post much more intimate. Imagine my surprise when she read her latest article out loud for her audience based on my suggestion! It was just fair I too gave it a go, after all, everyone made it seem so easy! Of course, it was harder than expected, so I won’t be reading the whole thing, but just a snippet, to get you started.

Bonus: My graduation day in (many) pictures

I’ve never liked those classic Disney Princesses needing a Prince to save them.

But have you ever noticed Prince Florian’s lipgloss? And those leggings hopping over the castle wall? The way he casually sings ‘Today’ with perfect vibrato? Goals.

I much preferred adventure-seeking Princesses such as Pocahontas and Mulan. They were strong and fearless and, frankly, had superior soundtracks. They were surrounded by cute little helpers and had the best adventures, just like me, during the most magical Summer days when I was a child.

I, too, painted with all the colours of the wind.

Gastroillogica

and I would spend our homestead Summers in a mountain cabin that could’ve fooled Hansel and Gretel. We woke up with freshly baked crostata pie on the windowsill and frequent visits from local deers, curiously watching us from the forest behind the house. Being a few years older than me, she became friends with the teens from a nearby cottage. They had electricity and video games. I had rainwater potions. She would draw maps of our family property as a treasure map and send me on endless explorations looking for fairies. I didn’t care, nor realise, it was a clever way to keep me busy. I spent my days between butterflies, tree houses, and Junior Woodchucks adventure journals.

I will forever refer to Huey, Dewey, and Louie as Qui, Quo, Qua. People around me will have to bear with me making foreign noises for once.

Maybe, I was less of a warrior Princess and more a lost Alice in Wonder-Down-Under-Land.

Just because I moved to the other side of the world to do the adulting thing, it didn’t mean I was not looking at the world with the same wonder-filled eyes.

In my Australian fairytale, the pie on the window would be a meat pie or a snag from Bunnings, and the boyfriend would be my magical helper, and in a way he delivered. Except for the house tour. He was by my side when I walked into the ominous palace called ‘the bank’ and we both celebrated with pancakes when I came out triumphant with my very own bank account of power and tax file number of wisdom.

It was a surprising outcome, as I was prepared for deportation, or worse, having to reprint a document. Blood and tears on paperwork were often the case with Italian bureaucracy, and they were not always your own. But on that glorious day, everything went smoothly. Maybe life down under was the opposite of what I was used to.

Should I expect a koala wearing a waistcoat to invite me to a tea party any moment now?

This is how I thought banking worked. Courtesy of Canva PRO.

Banking has always felt like a heroic quest.

I blame the omnipresent bank calendar in every classroom when I was in school. It usually portrayed an adventurous ant or some other woodland creature. I remember how responsible and accomplished I felt when my parents opened my first kiddy bank account.

I was the little ant! I was squirrelling my coins away for a rainy day!

I have removed all memories of going to a bank in England but I somehow got an account set up. As proof, I still received statements from my basic student account. I spent as much of it as possible before leaving at the end of my year abroad to avoid termination fees but I technically still owned one.

Me: I have overseas assets! An offshore bank account. International liquidity…

British bank statement: Total balance £0.81

My Australian banking experience was almost esoteric.

I’d like to think fate made me walk into that bank but clairvoyance was not involved in the decision, which was purely geographical. The boyfriend simply took me to the closest branch. Regardless, I felt it was an initiation when the fortune teller used her divination powers and scrying monitor to conjure interest rates and fees. To my arts and humanities brain, it sounded mystical.

How did she know about my brackets and thresholds? I didn’t even know I had them! Am I part of a cult now? Do I get a gold star?

That day, I felt like I conquered something important. I was holding tangible and official proof that I was residing in Australia and had a Tax File Number. I didn’t know what for, but it sounded important. I was also the proud owner of not one but two accounts: a savings one, and a cheque one. That was a first! I planned to wire money from my Italian account to my savings account to take advantage of the bonus interest, now that I knew what that meant, and to transfer enough money to my ‘everyday spending’ account weekly. Being responsible seemed easy.

Easy?!

It was not easy.

I quickly learnt that moving to a different Country with only a 20-kilo suitcase and being surrounded by the coolest shops I’ve ever seen, made every outing a shopping adventure.

The first things I bought were pastel notebooks with quirky titles: ‘Mermaid hair - don’t care’, ‘I want to be a unicorn trainer’, ‘I can’t adult today’. I also had to buy a flatpack holographic unicorn head to assemble and hang on a wall.

As you’d expect from someone without budgeting knowledge, I was often notified by overly kind sales assistants and check-out machines that I had insufficient funds in my cheque account to complete transactions. I resorted to using my savings account all the time, or randomly moving money from one to the other as needed. That was not the plan but “mermaid hair - don’t care”, am I right?

I needed an oracle to understand personal finance. I also needed a job, preferably a legitimate one that paid real money. But first I needed to sort out my resumé. That’s an adventure for another day.

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Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence:

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