Banking tips for travelers

Travel Banking has always been a bit of an issue with long term travelers, so many times I’ve seen horrible surprises like reaching a new country and having your card declined or outrageous fees for making a withdrawal. Another concern of course should always be security. The only problem we ever had while traveling was our cash being so secure. When I lost the card – our money was so secure I couldn’t even get to it… £130 and two days later a new card was couriered to us while we waited in Hanoi. Hopefully this will help you avoid doing the same.

• The Cash Card: Nationwide Flex account debit card. Basically it doesn’t charge you for withdrawals and it gives a competitive exchange rate straight out of the ATM, we never had a problem with it being blocked for “security” reasons.

• The Savings account: It makes sense not to keep all your eggs in one basket and with the wide availability of WiFi and internet cafe’s, internet banking is never far away. Keep the bulk of your dosh is descent savings account and drip feed it across that way if your card is stolen or cloned they wont get much, also you will make much better interest on it and be a lot more conscious of what your spending.
• The Backup: Get a credit card or another debit card, stash it away inside some dirty undies or something just in case you do loose your card (This happened to us and we were stranded for a week in Hanoi while we waited for another).

• The Backup Backup: As with computing it’s always good practice to back up your backups and what we did was stash a $100 bill in a secret pocket on our bags, this way when your being hustled across a border crossing with no ATM for miles your covered… The green backs are a universal communication tool!

Have a look at the Money Saving Expert site, it offers great advice for travelers and was a great resource for us…