banking woes

I recently ordered online for some goodies to be sent to friends in Manila for Christmas.  I didn’t have any problems with placing my orders, both of the shops that I dealt with were really good with their customer service, answering my emails quickly and updating me with the progress if needed. What I was terribly disappointed and frustrated about was that when I transferred the payments online to their bank accounts, I got charged P150 each for the two transactions that I did. This was not the charge imposed by my bank (which charged me P10 each for the online transfer) but a charge by BPI the receiving bank. I don’t mind any additional charge for the transfer if it was only minimal but a P150 for receiving an online transfer? I find it a big amount to charge. Considering that this was a local bank to bank transfer and not an international remittance. I don’t know what the difference is with how the banks in Manila do local bank to bank transfers to how banks in say Singapore and Australia do it. In both Singapore and Australia, where I have experienced doing domestic bank to bank transfer we don’t get charged for both outgoing or incoming transfer. Or in the case of Australia you get charged depending on your account type and only if you exceed the allowed number of electronic transactions. Hay, I really can’t understand it. I think it should be a basic service that should be part of online banking, I would think that it costs less for the bank to have their account holders do their transactions online than have them all go to the branches to do their banking where the bank would have to put more people to man the counters. Oh and when my suppliers asked their bank about the transaction BPI told them that the missing amount were charges made by my bank. They don’t tell their account holders that they charge for the incoming transfer. Grrr! In the end, I had to ask a favor from my brother to go to the bank and deposit the balance when it should have been covered to begin with. Good thing both of the suppliers still went ahead with the deliveries while waiting for me to settle the balance.

goodbye angkong

Thursday morning we were informed with the sad news that Ichi’s maternal grandfather passed away. Although I didn’t get the chance to really get to know angkong I found him to be a very quiet and caring man. I was amazed that even at an old age he knew everyone and he knew where and what is happening with his children and grandchildren’s lives — that’s with about 50 people in the family (children plus in laws, grandkids and great grandkids). It is unfortunate that we won’t be able to make it home for the wake and funeral and to say our final goodbyes. But I know that angks will understand. We will miss you!

Photo taken during the celebration of Angkong’s 90th birthday in 2006.

Philippines’ Top 40 Richest

Forbes.com recently released their list of The Philippines’ 40 Richest. You can read the whole article here. Below are the Top 10.

1. Henry Sy & family – Net Worth: $3,100 million
2. Lucio Tan & family – Net Worth: $1,500 million
3. Jaime Zobel de Ayala & family – Net Worth: $1,200 million
4. Andrew Tan – Net Worth: $700 million
5. Tony Tan Caktiong & family – Net Worth: $690 million
6. John Gokongwei Jr & family – Net Worth: $680 million
7. Eduardo Cojuangco Jr – Net Worth: $610 million
8. Enrique Razon Jr – Net Worth: $525 million
9. George Ty & family – Net Worth: $435 million
10. Inigo & Mercedes Zobel – Net Worth: $430 million

What do you think of the list?

mamma mia!

Went to watch the movie last Wednesday with my mom and aunt. It’s a fun fun fun movie, I really enjoyed it a lot. My mom super enjoyed it that she is adding the Abba songs to her repertoire on their karaoke nights. Meryl Streep is such a good actress, you can really throw any role at her and she’ll just shine. And I so love Pierce Brosnan here. 

who’s kissing E?

While in Manila last January, my mom took us to dinner at Metrowalk and we saw that they had a dolphin show there (Wonderful World of Dolphins) and of course E wanted to see the show. It was a bit pricey though at P300/head, and at the same rate for both adults and kids but we still watched since the guama wanted to please the apo hehe. So we watched the show with I think about less than 40 people in attendance. But the good thing about it was E got chosen to go up for the sea lions, he didn’t know what was gonna happen that’s why when the sea lion kissed him he didn’t like it. As soon as he stepped off the stage until he got back to his seat, he was wiping off his cheek with his hands and saying “eeww!”. After the show though when they were announcing that you can have your picture taken with the dolphin, E immediately told me that he wanted to do that. And after asking him a number of times if he really wanted it (obvious ba na ayaw ko nung una kasi may bayad eh :p) we queued up. And yes, we ended up buying his pic with the sea lion as well.

our newest addition to the family

To our extended family that is. Our new baby niece – Mika.

Congratulations Ival & Cathy.  Welcome to the world baby Mika.

e turns 3

We celebrated E’s birthday last January in Manila. At first we thought of planning a big party (this would be the first time we would celebrate his birthday in Manila with our families) but we opted to just throw him a simple birthday dinner. Good thing my BIL’s wife has a restaurant (Tony’s Bar & Grill along Mindanao Avenue) so we just reserved the function room and ordered a buffet dinner.

One thing we had to take care of before going home to the province for the new year was to order E’s birthday cake. So off we went to Goldilocks at Trinoma. After going through the cakes album, we decided on getting him a Cars-themed cake and had E choose which design he wanted.

On the day of his birthday he was so excited to get his cake that when we loaded the cake in the car he kept peeking around the tissue cover. He had lots of fun at the party running around with his cousins and playing with his uncles. I think the most fun was when blowing out the birthday candles. He had so much fun hearing everyone sing him the birthday song and knowing that once the song was finished he would get to blow out the candles that we did it five times.

Here are some of the pics:

with ichi’s fam	with my fam
with my cute goddaughter A	e with his godsister T
singing happy birthday	blowing his cake
E was super happy with the birthday song and blowing of the candles that we did it 5 times
birthday boy	family pic
family friends	with hs friends
lim cousins
getting the cars	E with his uncles, cousins and godsister

more pics here.

Vote for your favorite cities for the first global Monopoly game

Help vote Manila into the wildcard cities for the Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition. Just go to the monopoly website and vote your favorite 10 cities from a pre-selected list and then vote Manila or any other city not in the list for the wildcard cities. Who knows we may just end up seeing Manila as one of the cities in the world’s first global Monopoly.

Voting for the top 10 cities ends on February 29, 2008 and March 9, 2008 for the wildcard cities.

happy new year!

We spent new years in the Philippines this year and on my mother-in-law’s side of the family the tradition is to ring in the new year at ichi’s grandfather’s province in Nueva Ecija. Growing up in the Philippines you always ring in the new year with firecrackers and fireworks and with ichi’s side it’s no different. Every year my brother-in-law (BIL) is tasked with buying the fireworks, the aunts and uncles would just give him a budget but this year they forgot that my BIL and his wife were not going back as they’re on their 8th month of pregnancy. So some of the cousins made a quick run the afternoon of December 31st to Bulacan to purchase some fireworks. E had a lot of fun watching the fireworks, he wouldn’t even let me cover his ears, telling me that it wasn’t loud at all.

Here’s a short clip of one of the fireworks.

renewing friendships

The other day I was able to meet up with an old college friend. It’s our first time to meet up since we graduated from college. Shortly before graduation we got into a misunderstanding that got blown out of proportion. Thinking back, we both could have done something about it but didn’t. We were supposed to meet up a few months back when she was in town but things didn’t work out and finally this time we were able to. Ej, if you’re reading this thank you for being the first to reach out months ago (wonders of technology na din :p) and we had a really fun time catching up. See you again and here’s to the start of a renewed friendship.