Banks. Grim the world over.

Whether you like it or not, I thought I'd introduce you to an intriguing little sub-plot to the whole emigration thing. One of the points that's been troubling me a bit is the piece of the puzzle that concerns banking.

As I've hinted at before, I'm not entirely without debt. Perhaps not as submerged as I was about three years ago, but still enough to be a millstone for another three to four years. It's all on payment plans, so there's a finite element to it, which is nice. Light at the end of the tunnel, even if that tunnel is extremely long.

So there's a certain amount of money that needs to go out of my UK personal account every month. Not having a UK salary to pay into it poses some issues. So I read with interest that HSBC offer what they call an 'International Personal Current Account', which purports to allow you to pay in and out in different currencies. Brilliant. Or so I thought.

Phoning HSBC was a bit of an experience, as no one person out of the five or six that I spoke to admitted to the existence of such an account. The most sense I got, having been shuttled from department to department, waited for a call back for a week, tried to arrange an appointment to no avail etc, was from a chap I spoke to this morning.

He said, and I'm so fed up with the whole thing that I'm prepared to believe him, that what it actually is is a number of individual accounts in the various currencies you need, which are loosely federated and allow you to transfer funds between them. At a cost, admittedly a small one. So far so... average.

The next bit's the punchline. The privilege of having them set up an account for me in New Zealand will cost me £100. This will save me a few weeks (and presumably a ton of hassle) getting it sorted once we're over there. I've not read all the documentation yet, but so far it looks like it might actually be worth doing in the general scheme of things.

Tell you what, this is like getting married. Wherever I turn there's another inflated charge that I can't really avoid paying. I'm seriously tempted to follow my grandparents' example and keep it under my mattress...