Talk Quesada forum

Morning all, I’m fed up with the charges from Caxia formally Bankia ( especially when I was set up for free banking).
Are there any disadvantages to switching my direct debits for Suma, electricity and water and not having a Spanish bank account? I know there is a daily limit to cash withdrawals but is there anything I am missing that will be detrimental to me if I close my Spanish account?
I already have a Starling and N26 online account that are dormant.
Many thanks in advance

Owen709646 wrote:Morning all, I’m fed up with the charges from Caxia formally Bankia ( especially when I was set up for free banking).
Are there any disadvantages to switching my direct debits for Suma, electricity and water and not having a Spanish bank account? I know there is a daily limit to cash withdrawals but is there anything I am missing that will be detrimental to me if I close my Spanish account?
I already have a Starling and N26 online account that are dormant.
Many thanks in advance

Use your N26 account for your Spanish direct debits. It has a Spanish IBAN and is accepted for all utilities. All our direct debits are from N26.

However, you have limited free ATM withdrawals with N26, not sure how much you can withdraw using Starling. We use a UK Santander debit card and get unlimited fee free withdrawals at Santander ATMs on mainland Spain.

Many thanks

I’d recommend opening a Wise account and transferring your Direct Debits to be paid from that - works perfectly including all utilities and Suma. We have this in place and happily and easily closed our account with Sabadel during our visit earlier this month so no more charges. Hope this helps.

Can you please advise how you transferred your Direct Debits to Wise. We have a Wise account for money transfers but having real difficulty finding the IBAN Numbers for our Direct Debits on the Caixia website to enable the payments.

TEEDOFFLATE wrote:Can you please advise how you transferred your Direct Debits to Wise. We have a Wise account for money transfers but having real difficulty finding the IBAN Numbers for our Direct Debits on the Caixia website to enable the payments.

You don't need ro find the IBANs for the companies you're paying...you just need to contact each company individually, and tell them YOUR Wise IBAN. They'll change it at their end.

Thanks for your prompt answer and I will proceed to open the Wise Account and inform the companies of the change.

TEEDOFFLATE wrote:Thanks for your prompt answer and I will proceed to open the Wise Account and inform the companies of the change.

No problem. I only had 2 "difficulties" - GoFibra (VegaFibra) and Hidraqua.

VegaFibra said their system couldn't accept my IBAN (which begins BE). Wise advised as follows:

"
If your BE IBAN isn’t accepted by your bank or a business, tell them that they're required to accept IBANs from other countries in the SEPA zone according to Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation. If they don't reply or don't agree, you can report it on this website:

https://wise.com/gb/blog/iban-not-accepted-reporting

They have to do this because of SEPA Regulation.
"


The Hidraqua change was easy when I did the following:

Go to the address below, click on the "Download the SEPA mandate" link towards the bottom of the page:

https://www.hidraqua.es/autorizaciones

Fill in the form, scan it, and send it to Hidraqua. They acted on it within 24 hours.

Thanks again for the heads up. I have tried to change my Iberdrola IBAN online and it seems to not want to accept it. We will go into the office tomorrow and see what that say.

Sorted all the DDs out apart from our Community Fees due to the system not being able to accept the IBAN. Is it normal for the ones set up not to show on the Wise account until thefirst payments are taken? Only asking due to nothing showing on the account.