Getting money back
22 September 2021This week has been a week where I finally got money back that although was rightfully mine, I had serious doubts whether I would get it all back. While nice to to so it is nevertheless a holdover from my old life that I would have preferred not having the need to deal with in the first place. This was a time that I had hoped would be dedicated with looking towards the future rather than any further dealing with people and organisations being difficult.
Bankruptcy creditor
One of the perks of past employment was this odd bonus system where long-story-short small awards were added to a pre-paid debit card. It was not possible to withdraw cash from this card account so it had to be used for shopping, but in practice it was a card I never carried with me and I only started to run down the balance earlier this year. The problem was the card scheme being run by Wirecard and the company for which the account belonged decided that former employees would not be migrated to a new provider. Having found this out I sent in my account redemption form as advised but since this was not a formal bank account my working assumption was that my claim was in that pile of unsecured creditors that just sits around when organisations go bankrupt. Just as well that my attempts at running down the account spent about half what I had on it. However a short while ago I got a reply to an old email regarding changing my address and as it turned out the Wirecard bankruptcy caused so many problems there is a 2-3 month backlog of queries. My email regarding change of address was shortly before I put in my balance reclaim, and this week it was finally processed. A good result since I had basically written it off by this point.Long overdue deposit
This week I also finally got the deposit back for the flat I vacated two months back, and in short while the landlord was not taking the piss it was not far short of it either. Of the €1800 deposit I got €1700 back with the deduction supposedly because a cleaner spent three days cleaning the place — leaving aside this clearly being bullshit as three days of cleaning would have been a lot more than €100 it is also not a legitimate reason for a deduction in the first place. I let it slide because I did leave some stuff in the flat — with the landlord's permission — that likley would have cost me that much to have disposed of, and in any case it was simply not worth my time to contest it.
Had i still been around I would have taken him to the city residency board but given current circumstances I am better off just forgetting about it, and while not knowing my details he clearly knows this. Over here in the UK they cleared out all bad practice by requiring deposits to be held in escrew and that deductions have to be backed up with proof of expenses. In the past I have had libertarian tendencies but while over-regulation is still a problem, “self regulation” is no regulation.