Handling Finances

Having spent the last week in London, I’m still a bit jet-lagged, but quite happy. It was my wife’s first time to another country (barring Canada) and happily she loved it! London’s pretty benign with their amazing and convenient subway system and although it’s an expensive place to visit, we kept our spending rather low and didn’t skimp on sightseeing one bit!

My first bit of advice regarding overseas travel, however, is much more basic and applies virtually worldwide.  Get a credit or debit card that charges low fees! Visa and Mastercard both charge 1% for foreign (non-US) purchases, and while most card issuers charge another 2% for a total of 3%, many smaller banks don’t add on any fees and Capital One actually eats the 1% Visa/MC fee and charges 0%.  I didn’t do my research ahead of time, so I got stuck with 1-3% on most of my purchases (1% on my debit card and 3% for a couple credit card purchases) and while that was only about $40, I hate to throw away money that’s not necessary!  To be fair, I understand the fees — processing transactions in England does cost the banks more, but when competition drives down the amount I have to pay, I’m happy to shop around!

I paid for most of my trip with cash taken out of ATMs every other day or so — a very convenient and reasonably secure way to deal with foreign money.  When dealing with ATMs though, it’s important to go only to ATMs that are physically connected to major banks.  You can shop around for the ones with no fees, but if you take out your money at ATMs of the money-changers that set up at every airport and tourist attraction, you can pay as much as 2-5% more than you would at a major bank’s ATM.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.