Friday, October 05, 2012

A shortage of safe deposit boxes

You would think that in a city like Hong Kong which is a significant financial centre it would be easy to rent a safe deposit box?

It's not.

The small safe deposit box we currently have is getting close to full so we made inquires about changing to a larger box. No chance. None at all. Plan B was to rent a second small box. No chance there either. Apparently there is a shortage of safe deposit boxes in Hong Kong. The banks are not really interested in providing them because the rental they can charge on the boxes is low compared to the cost of renting or owning the property in which the safe deposit boxes are held.

So far I have drawn a blank with both HSBC and BOCHK - neither have any boxes available for rent. We can get by without a bigger/second box but at some point we will have to move documents like our wills out of the box and keep them at home.

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