Today, I want to talk to you about my personal experience with the administration in Sweden.
University registration
I was very pleasantly surprised when I arrived in Linköping, because you only need to drop by the Info Center to register when you arrive. They ask for your ID and give you information on how to create your student account and upload a photo for the student card. The next day, you are able to pick up your student card. No copious amount of paper to sign or anything of the like. You then go to your roll call and register for your classes online after the first course in each of them. Quite easy, right?
Personal number & ID
If you are staying longer than a year, it is worth getting your personal number from Skatterverket (Tax Office). Here you can find my journey in this process. Overall, not that hard either. Once you have all your papers, you drop them at the Tax Office, wait a couple of months and get your number! We are now in November. I booked an appointment with the Tax Office for 2 weeks later in order to make my Swedish ID, and two weeks after that, I could drop by to get my ID.
Bank account
After getting my personal number and ID, I tried to open a bank account. Many of my friends told me about ICA Banken, an online bank quite easy to get. Indeed that was the case. I got my bank account ready in a couple of weeks. However, when I tried to register for a BankID, a digital identification to sign papers, log into digital services and access Swish (the money transfer app that everyone in Sweden uses), it didn’t go as expected: impossible to create a BankID with online banking due to new regulations last summer. 😥 We are now mid-January.
A bit annoying but not that much a problem. I move on to create a new bank account with Danske Bank, which my friends recommended too. I started by going to the bank office to make sure I’ll be able to create a BankID this time around. They said yes: hurrah! I had to fill out some forms online, and wait until I received the paper contract to sign a couple weeks later. One issue: it was in Swedish. That’s less of a problem when everything is online because you can use a website translator but on paper, it is not always easy to understand the translation. Thankfully, I had some Swedish friends to help me go through the contract and I sent it back.
Then no news. Radio silence.
In March, I started getting antsy. I reached out to them twice a week and then on a daily basis but they couldn’t sign me up and see some information because I didn’t have a Bank ID. So they told me they’ll contact the right department and they’ll call me back. I never got that callback.
And suddenly, beginning of May, I received a ton of envelopes with my bank card, info that my bank account was created and other important information. Once I figured out how to log in, it was easy to create a Bank-ID!
In total, it took me 8 months to have a bank account set up, which made getting paid a lot easier (if you don’t want to have enormous change fees to your home account and back to pay for daily necessities in Sweden).
I know that this process isn’t as long for everybody. I might have just been unlucky but I hope that this story will make you prepared!
