There are important tips you should keep in mind when it comes to the best way to travel with money overseas. Getting the biggest bang for your travel buck should be a part of your planning, whether your heading out for a spontaneous weekend getaway or putting the final touches on a trip around the world that took a year to organize. It’s certainly a lot easier to manage your money, and your budget when your travels are limited to one country, but there are some guidelines that are fairly universal.
This week, I want to talk about cash… actual hold-in-your-hands cash, and the best way to travel with money. We’ll delve into debit and credit cards in later posts, but although we are moving towards a cashless society, you will almost certainly run into at least one situation where physical money does need to change hands.
I’m officially old enough to be able to use the phrase “back in the day” non-ironically. So… back in the day, money management for extended travel meant one thing – travelers’ checks. Part of the routine in pre-travel prep was a stop by the bank to pick up enough travelers’ checks to last the length of the trip. The whole process of signing and then later countersigning the checks, making sure they were stored in a safe place and confirming the hotel you were staying in would cash them was cumbersome, time consuming and mostly an inconvenient but necessary part of traveling. Even when ATM’s became a normal part of daily life, there was that brief period when you still had to worry an ATM near you may not be connected to your banking network.
I am well aware that after a setup like that, the next sentence any millennial should expect to read should mention how I would ride my dinosaur to the next stop on our journey, or how I had to walk uphill to school in the snow (both ways!) with a baked potato in each hand to keep warm. To this, I would just say… noted.
It is, of course, much easier now. Before setting out on a production leg of our documentary, we had so many last minute issues to deal with, getting cash for the trip was far down the list of priorities. Even though our itinerary included the Australian outback and the interior of New Zealand’s North Island, the idea that we would be stranded somewhere without access to either cash or a way to pay for emergency supplies never entered our minds.
Doing this economically though, was a major concern, and the best way to travel with money overseas is do a certain amount of homework. It should be a major concern of yours, too, because while there are plenty of ways to obtain physical cash on the road, there are also many ways to be bogged down by exorbitant fees. I would urge you to take the steps we took, avoid some of the mistakes we made and craft your planning accordingly.
The best way to travel with money overseas is to understand the home country advantage
. If you plan to carry cash, the best way to travel with money is to get it before you go. Your bank or ATM in your home country likely has one major advantage – it’s free. While there’s no doubt carrying cash involves a certain amount of risk, you have to weigh how much of that risk you’re willing to take compared to how much money in extra currency exchange fees you’re willing to pay. This is, by the way, the reason travelers’ checks still exists, There is a modicum of safety built in to carrying those checks. You have to countersign them and show your ID before you can use them, even though there are fewer and fewer places that accept them or even know what they are.
While safety on the road is a future topic, I will tell you that for the cash we took with us, it was not only divided up and stored in different places, a very small amount of it was placed in a dummy wallet, a fake wallet with a few dollars and an expired credit card. Let the thieves steal that one, we reasoned, and we would be far removed by the time they realized they had stolen a useless decoy. Simply put, when it comes to cash, the best way to travel with money includes not keeping it all in one place.
Exchange it before you go
It’s very likely you will find the best currency exchange rates in your home country. Start by getting the current exchange rates – I like to start with the easy to use Google currency converter. Your own bank is likely to charge you a much lower currency exchange fee… or even waive it altogether… if you change your money there before you leave. For more common international currencies like the Euro, the yuan or the yen, it should not be a problem. This was one tactic I wish I had realized before we left. We needed to exchange some currency in Adelaide and had assumed any bank would do it for us. I was more than surprised to find this was a service only available to customers of the banks we tried to use. Lesson learned.
Airports are not your friends
Most international airports will have very visible currency exchange stations in the concourse, but the best currency exchange rates are seldom at he airpot. It’s a popular business, and the key word here is “business.” They are not there to offer a charitable service. They make their money on your need to get cash quickly, and they are the only game in town. In the Sydney airport, this came to an uncomfortable eight percent of the total of whatever you’re exchanging. Avoid this at all costs. If you are dead set on sacrificing money for convenience, about the only extra bit of advice I can offer is to ask if they will waive the exchange fee for your return trip. In some cases, currency exchange stations will, with your prior receipt, change your currency back into the original currency with a reduced or waived fee.
However, you should know that when it comes to the best way to travel with money, you will almost always pay the highest fees at the worst exchange rates at the airport.
You really need to know the lay of the currency land to find the best way to travel with money overseas. Dollars count. Cents count even more. Allow me to offer this one example when it comes to why you should do your homework, even if it’s done at the last minute, when it comes to exchange rates. As we landed in Adelaide, I checked that day’s, in fact I checked that hour’s , current exchange rate for U.S. dollars into Australian dollars. The current rate at that moment was 1.41… one U.S. dollar would get you $1.41 in Australian currency. Knowing this, it made the idea of paying the exchange rate fees at the airport even more undesirable, since they were also offering an exchange rate of only $1.36 cents to the U.S. dollar. This may not seem like a lot, but when you are potentially exchanging hundreds of dollars of currency, those numbers add up pretty quickly. It should only take a little research to find where you can exchange currency in the city to which you’re traveling. Besides, if you’ve been doing your prep work, you already have at least a little currency of the country you’re in, which you may need for cab fare, tipping and whatever the local equivalent of a Cinnabon is.
All at once or a little at a time?
This decision should be based on how the fee is calculated by the exchange service you’re using. If, as we found, some exchange services charge a flat fee no matter how much currency you’re converting, then of course you want to exchange the largest amount you feel comfortable carrying with you. If it’s a flat percentage, just make sure you have what you need to get by, but do be sure that you know where and when you’ll make your next exchange, and if the same rules will apply at that locale.
This all seems like antiquated advice, to be talking about cash, right? After all, there are ATM’s everywhere. We’ll deal with the myth of ATM’s as travel sviors next week, but All I can say is that my mother was right. You should always have a little cash in our pocket for emergencies.
Just don’t tell her I said that.
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