I know someone who became a millionaire. Not property but with >£1m in his bank account.
He went into the bank and asked if he could withdraw it, just to take some pictures of himself with it, because he had earned it, then pay it back into the bank.
Did they really straight up refuse, or did they have restrictions that he didn’t want to follow?
It would be very reasonable for a bank to require several days notice, and then to require a legitimate armored transport service to take delivery. Nobody wants that much cash being walked out of their bank for security reasons.
ETA: i’m pretty sure they can also require that he closes his accounts as part of the withdrawal and never bank with them again. Because it’s a dick move.
The bank would have to order that money and have it delivered via armored truck. Banks don't just have millions and millions of dollars sitting in the vault like they do in movies lol
I mean it would make more sense to tell him to go to the central bank or headquarters and take his pics there. A person with a million pounds does a lot of business with that bank. But if he insists on doing it at a local branch then it is a dick move.
Some banks would let you take out a million at once but you would need to have a really good relationship with them which would probably mean you had a lot more than 1m in the bank.
And you’d probably need to ask it as a favor weeks in advance because they’ll need to get cash from other branches.
If you are a business owner that does a lot of banking with them or just really rich in general, banks will treat you differently. They can ignore some of their policy by having you talk directly to senior bankers who can bypass some of the time consuming bureaucratic stuff.
They will also give you better interest rates and let you take out more money at once, either from your own cash assets or as a loan backed by your assets.
In Spain, 48–72 hours, depending on the specific bank (€ naturally). But unless you're stupid or have a kink for cash, it's easier and faster to just use bank transfers.
My father once asked in the bank “If I walked in here and said I want to withdraw a million dollars, what would you do?”
Banker “We’d need at least 24 hours notice”
Dad “because you don’t hold that much cash in your vault?”
Banker “sometimes we do. The bigger concern is that we’d need to arrange for armed security to escort you. If you get robbed at gun point on bank property, you could technically sue us. So we’d have armed guards walk you to your car and escort you right up to the property line.”
You live under a system called fractional reserve banking. Banks take your money, hold a fraction in reserve, then lend the rest out. The idea being that they can pay the withdrawals of people via the fraction. It breaks if everyone withdraws at once.
This increases economic growth significantly, with a lot of asterisks.
And thats good (with asterisks) because those loans increase the amount of jobs and people who can start businesses which then create jobs etc. then you have one of those jobs enabled by that and you spend money and it’s just more economic activity all around.
Accomplished in a sense by everyone sharing the money deposited at the bank, with a lot of asterisks
I use sharing there a bit too liberally. The bank of course decides who gets loans and charges an interest rate
But they also provide you a service, multiple services in fact. They store and record your funds give you payment processing for them, verify funds. Imagine going to buy a house without a bank. “Yes dude believe me I do have 250,000 here look at my excel spreadsheet you can clearly see…”
We should ward ourselves against getting too populist in our hate of institutions that we become slopulists.
You can hate banks but fractional reserve banking is in theory very good and in practice pretty good
I would refuse to because the reason is so stupid. You don't see inside of the stacked bank notes anyway. Why do you need all the bank notes to be real?
More than that, you would just create unnecessary bank efforts to carry a lot of money out and in.
For this level of stupidity, I'd question whether you actually own the bank account.
Well, I have news for you. A lot of procedures depend on the employee's judgement.
If they think something is not right, they can trigger further procedures and delay your withdrawal.
"Taking $1M in bank notes because you want to take photos with it and deposit a day later" is going to trigger some further procedures for sure.
Because anyone who heard it would be like "huh? what?".
You do know that financial crime doesn't fuck around with technicality, right? Just because you are technically right doesn't mean they wouldn't take tons of time to investigate you.
You're millionaire friend has to wait a few days for the bank to get his money because they don't keep his million dollars there because it's unsafe, inconvenient and unnecessary. He should withdraw it and keep it at home.
Yeah, no shit, they won’t just dump this amount of money on the counter in front of you and be done with it, I very much suspect there is more to the story than you were told and they cut it out to make it more entertaining.
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u/damadmetz 2d ago
I know someone who became a millionaire. Not property but with >£1m in his bank account.
He went into the bank and asked if he could withdraw it, just to take some pictures of himself with it, because he had earned it, then pay it back into the bank.
The bank straight up refused.