Wednesday, April 01, 2009

these ATMs are awesome

The standard ATM in the States only doles out $20 bills. It's adequate, but sometimes you just need small bills. Small, non-sequential, unmarked bills. Because throwing rolls of pennies onto the stage upsets some people. But at least a $20 is small enough that you're hard-pressed to find an establishment that doesn't take a $20 or would even hesitate to take one. My first few times using an ATM here (no transaction fees!), I took out 50,000 HUF and it came in five 10,000 HUF bills. Each bill is about $45 and many places seem to struggle to make change for such bills and/or balk at taking them. I noticed the ATMs listed 25,000 HUF as one of the default options so I figured hey, it does bills other than 10K so let's see if I can get five 5,000 HUF bills. Um, no. I get one 5,000 bill and one 20,000 HUF bill. I shared this tale of woe with one of my colleagues and he clued me in an a secret. You can get 1,000 HUF bills out of an ATM and you can get them by requesting something like 19,000 HUF from the ATM and you end up with one 10K, one 5K, and 4 1K bills. Success!

2 comments:

$$$$$ said...

Duh...big deal. As long as they dish out real money. Wait till you encounter some ATMs that eat your card and don't spit out any cash and the card disappears along with the cash in your account.

Anonymous said...

Most of the time the card will not disappear. Only your money will be drained or over withdrawn from your account after your PIN got duplicated from the machine.

Some people are lurking around the ATMs waiting for people like you to withdraw their cash and rob them on the spot, especailly at night! Use the ATM inside the bank during the banking hour if it is convenient.