Foreign Perspectives

For most people the answer is simple: they’ll look it up in their favourite price comparison site.

They’d not find it there, or at least they would but the ranking systems used don’t always mean that the cheapest card pops up on the top of the list, especially when you consider that the majority of such sites are financed by income from affiliate links so there’s generally a certain amount of bias built in. Anyway, because of this I thought that I’d look through all the offers around and find which one was really the cheapest.

That wasn’t nearly so simple a task as you might think. Although there are rules about how they should display their charges in fact that tends not to work to the advantage of the lower charging cards as much as you might expect.

Anyway, I thought that I’d finally got it sussed and it was the ICE travel money card that was far and away the winner. After all, it was free to issue and renew when all the rest charged, so how could it not be the best? Well, the FairFx card was coming in at £1 per withdrawal vs £1.75 a go for ICE so at some level of spending FairFX would pull ahead of course. Still, it was £10 to issue and £6 to renew so you’d need a more than 10 cash withdrawals a year for it to be cheaper.

But then a few days after I posted the article, I found out that you can get the card free (via the link here) which levelled up the playing field and then I checked further into the exchange rate charge and they only charge 1%. I still don’t like cards that charge though and that £6 renewal charge was there albeit only every three years.

However, now it turns out that the FairFX people have free renewals so long as you topup your card at least once every three years so in fact what seemed like a potentially high charging card turned out to be the cheapest one by a long way.

And that’s the snag of the charges tables that the rules insist on: the FairFX card doesn’t sit well in them because, by and large, its charges are conditional. The £10 issue fee is optional in fact but clearly stated in the table. Likewise for the renewal fee. Their currency conversion charge is “about 1%” because they give you the best available at the time so they don’t seem to be able to state that in the charges table.

Anyway, you can read the full review over on my other blog.