Expat Community > Nicaragua

majicjack
Joined 2011
Posts: 667

Customs and Packages

10 years ago

Our bank in the USA recently changed from VISA to MasterCard for the debit cards. This decision was not passed on to the customers until two weeks before to let us know our old cards would no longer be valid.
Our mail goes to our youngest daughter address so we called her and asked her to FedEx the cards to us.
She did not want to describe the contents as debit cards for fear of theft. She shipped them as documents. When they arrived in Nicaragua, customs opened the envelope and there were documents describing the cards and information on how to activate them. Instead if sending them on to the house for which we paid for them to do we had to go to the airport in Managua and go through all the customs BS for two little plastic cards. Being we have residency and the law states that being here with retirement residency we do not have to pay taxes on any money we receive from the USA. The cards themselves have no value until we activate them and then only to us or some crook if they have our information. The only thing they could come up with to charge us on was the freight or shipping cost but they let that slide. We have our cards and a day before the old ones expired. If you have someone ship you something make damn sure they document everything that is in the shipment. I told my daughter to check in the future and if there is a piece of rat crap in the envelope either declare it or dump it our to keep from getting fined for shipping animal remains or products. Poor countries have a way of dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's if they think there is a dime in it for them. They screw everything else up terribly but they spent two hours on the computer trying to find away to charge for the cards. They had to cut down half of a forest just to cover all the copies I had to have made.
P.S. Insure that the name of the receiver is letter perfect. That is another two hours of waiting to get the name right in their system.

William Russell

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