True story of a friend in UAE who was stuck in a banking dispute unnecessarily resulting in week long anxiety
Every year I come to know of multiple instances where people don’t have the slightest clue of particular banking rule which creates either financial loss to them OR personal anxiety and loss of time — “time,” BTW is finite unlike the money you own, so consider lost time, the bigger loss than any money.
Anyways, I was talking to a friend recently and he narrated a story recently happened to him – I heard similar stories ever since I moved to UAE and people are still not educated about these stuff. I have talked about some points which you should know while dealing with banks in a video, which I will link below but this is a practical example and expats specially in GCC countries should know of in order to safeguard their hard earned money and prevent themselves from anxiety.
So, what happened was that this friend of mine who is well placed in terms of his work, got a very good offer from another company for a challenging lucrative role which he accepted. Now, you know as per the UAE law, most of the things are tied up to the current job and things move as your status changes.
For his part, he took some personal loan from the same bank where his salary gets deposited a couple of months back. The trouble started when the company intimated the bank that he has resigned and the bank immediately seized his account and whatever amount he hold in the bank got frozen.
Now, this all happened because of some laws in the UAE which allows the bank to hold the amount in such cases until the employer assures the bank that he will continue to pay his loan installments or pay in full right away. Although my friend was fully committed to pay loan installment as promised and had no plan to even leave UAE – but as the banks nowadays are very strict and don’t want any exposure on themselves, they won’t take any chances in such cases.
This whole scenario made me write this up and people who work in the GCC countries should be aware of such scenarios and prepare beforehand to avoid such a situation – for that purpose, please note the points below:
Keep yourself aware of the situation you are in the bank’s system – even a car loan is considered a liability and can throw you in such situation.
In case you are about to resigning from existing job, make sure to withdraw any funds from your salary account.
Always have a collateral ready with you in case you go for a personal loan as the laws in UAE will support the banks to recover any amount due on you.
Eventually the friend that I was talking about negotiated with the bank and got the bank account reactivated – but the anxiety he has to go through for that one week was unexplainable. So its advised to be cautious while changing jobs as mentioned above with the banks.
Watch the videos uploaded this week in case you missed any: