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Critical mass? I had to start using it after moving to Germany, because everyone else expects you to use it. One of the ladies at daycare is leaving? Here's a
by rciorba 21d ago
Critical mass? I had to start using it after moving to Germany, because everyone else expects you to use it.
One of the ladies at daycare is leaving? Here's a paypal link to chip in for a good-bye present.
Split a take-out order with a German friend, but he paid? Here's his paypal to send him your share.
It's just assumed that everyone has paypal over here...
- iammrpayments 21d agoThought they use Sepa
- netsharc 21d agoSEPA uses your IBAN (account number), and one can also enter this account number for payment, implicitly allowing the store to withdraw money from it...
- fuzzy2 21d agoWell yes. But just in case this wasn't clear: this is a crime, and you will get your money back in most cases. It's on the merchant to ensure a Direct Debit Mandate is actually valid.
- master-lincoln 21d agoI do not think it is possible to withdraw money having only an IBAN. It would need a SEPA direct debit mandate for my bank to accept the transfer request.
- crote 21d agoIBANs aren't secret, they have the same level of confidentiality as your address or birth date. One-off SEPA Direct Debit is virtually unheard of, recurring payments are a bit more common but usually involve a €0,01 payment to prove ownership of the account. The transactions are also trivial to undo, and can only be initiated by companies. So no, "IBAN fraud" isn't a thing in practice. You can safely share your IBAN with your friends for instant free wire transfers.
- c7b 21d agoYou must be referring to SEPA Direct Debit, which would be very risky to use to siphon funds. There's an 8 week no-questions-asked refund policy, 13 months for unauthorized transactions, if the payment fails (eg due to insufficient balance), the payee is charged a non-refundable cancelation fee. [0] And that's all separate from any legal troubles for fraudulent charges. I don't know why Germans use PayPal over SEPA, but I'd be surprised if SEPA Direct Debit was the reason. [0] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-direct-debit https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-direc...
- skinfaxi 21d agoThat sounds like the same info on a check, which people hand out freely. I'm probably misunderstanding.
- rciorba 21d agoSepa is how my kid's daycare debits me each month, or how I transfer money to other accounts (most bills are direct-debit, but sometimes I get a one-off invoice and I have to transfer the money myself). But for the small person-to-person type thing, paypal is the defacto here (sadly).
- mr_mitm 21d agoI wish. The small inconvenience of putting in an IBAN and a matching name instead of just an email address is already enough for many people to default to paypal. Just happened to me again yesterday, the guy preferred to bring cash next time we see each other instead of just receiving my info via text.
- carlosjobim 21d ago"The guy" probably let you know in a polite way that you were behaving immaturely. You're not supposed to ask your friends for money to split bills etc. The way grown ups do it is "I pay this time, you pay next time".
- socksy 21d agoThis is not how German culture works.
- drabbiticus 21d agoThis seems likely to be cultural, possibly even microcultural. I know many adults who believe that splitting bills is a normal and reasonable thing to do.
- carlosjobim 21d agoSplitting bills, where each pay a part in the restaurant, fine. Splitting bills where one pays and the other sends him money, not.
- drabbiticus 21d agoWho is making these rules up? Why do you think they apply universally?
- carlosjobim 20d agoGod made them, as far as I know. Humanity lived in gift economies long before the invention of barter and trade. These are etiquette rules, which have their benefits. Since nobody is forced to follow etiquette, they help you to learn things about people. Generosity is one of the easiest life hacks to find out who is friendly towards you and who is not. If you buy them a drink and they won't buy you a drink back, that's a tiny cost for you to know what kind of fellow you're dealing with. If they buy you a drink and then asks you to transfer money to them, you also learn something about them. If people splitting bills want to sit and count to make sure that everybody pays exactly for what they had, then you learn something. And so on. If you invite people for dinner a few times, you will learn something about that person whether you wanted to or not.
- cloudie78 21d agoTime to start heralding change you want to see. Offer Wero instead. It’s really simple.
- OroPla 21d agoAs a German that never has encountered PayPal in the wild and doesn't have a Paypal account either, your narration requires elaboration to be believable.
- dewey 21d agoI'm not doubting you but I have a hard time believing that, as I see it all the time. Sometimes restaurants even accept it if they don't take card and then ask you to send to their private PayPal account as a fallback. It's even part of many German memes around the German way of always splitting the bills, even if it's just < 5 euros.
- OroPla 21d agoWhat you are describing sounds like a weird alternative reality. I never heard of always splitting bills, either. But it's not exactly a homogeneous country. To the point everyone jokes that Bavaria isn't even German, for example. Depending on which state you are in, your experience can be vastly different. All the states used to be kinda independent two hundred years ago. Including having different currencies. Unification happened 1871. Bismarck and later Hitler kinda brought the nation together, but after losing two world wars national pride got frowned upon and having the iron curtain cut through the country didn't help in fostering a German identity, either. Reunification was only 36 years ago. Though, about a third to maybe half of the German territory remains lost after losing the wars. Instead we got the EU. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's always funny to see foreigners make fun of German supposed clichés that I never had any exposure to whatsoever, like Lederhosen, which is only a thing in Southern Germany.
- drdexebtjl 21d ago“I don’t use paypal, here’s cash”