Money, Money, Money! Getting Cash Abroad

During my travels around the world, I learned that all the spending I did didn't earn me any points. Most merchants either preferred cash and some didn't even accept credit cards at all. (If you've been reading this blog, you know not earning points while spending really breaks my heart.)

XE app for phones

So what are my strategies for access to cash while traveling? Read on to find how I prepare for my travels.


When departing for my travels, I like to take at least $100 cash with me. That allows me to arrive and exchange enough money for most transportation out of the airport to my hostel/hotel. Why not take more cash and exchange it at the airport kiosks? I'll show you why with a few examples I came across:

From Europe (Euros) to UK  (GBP - British sterling pound), I wanted to exchange €45 into pounds, a market value of £38.50. Instead, I ended with £31.60, a 16% (or $10) loss. Ouch. The problem with kiosks is that that they take a flat fee on top of giving you a worse exchange rate. So even if you exchange a large amount of currency to negate the flat fee, you still lose money per dollar exchanged due to the worse rate.

My flight from Kuala Lumpur to Sri Lanka arrived late in the evening, and I was unaware if exchange kiosks were open when I landed so I decided to exchange in Kuala Lumpur. I exchanged another $100 USD and received my money. I looked at the XE app and discovered I lost $30 USD on that transaction. Don't exchange before getting into the country.

Hopefully now, you won't touch the proverbial hot stove after reading my losses from the examples above. The answer I discovered was the Bluebird card (yes the same one we use to load Vanilla reloads to). It only charges a flat $2.50 USD fee for foreign withdrawals within their network. On top of the cheaper flat fee, I got money at the current market price. Using this link I searched every country I was visiting and made a document showing which ATM's were considered within the network. Once in the country I just Google mapped the ATM locations. Below is a part of the document I printed out for my trip:

Taiwan $10US= 300 NTD

July 16th:

Flight: ICN-TPE CX421 9:25am-10:55am

Lodging: Friends place in Taiwan

Bus/subway to taipei main station: Private bus 60 min, 125NTW Taiwan bus core kuokuang

 

As you can see I included the current market exchange rate in case my phone wasn't working, flight information, lodging, how to get out of the airport to where I needed to be including cost, and most importantly, which banks were included in bluebird's network.

There are some debit cards floating around that will charge nothing for foreign ATM's out of network, but I have yet to acquire them and honestly don't know much about them. Accessing money is still a learning experience for me, but I hope I showed a few tactics to save yourselves a few bucks.

Questions or some secret tactics that you know of?