Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Everyone will tell you that credit cards are the thing to use on holiday and they are, most of the time.

The problems with credit cards are that they’re not always accepted, how you get charged depends on how you use them and you can end up with unexpected shocks when you return home and find all the charges you’ve racked up. That said, you’d be very unwise to go on holiday without one.

Credit and charge cards operate in much the same way and the only practical differences are that charge card bills are supposed to be repaid in full at the end of the month and that, usually, they don’t tell you what your credit limit is with a charge card. Don’t believe those stories of charge cards coming with no limit: there is one, it’s just that usually they don’t tell you what it is.

For holiday purposes there are really only five international-use versions that you could reasonably expect to be able to use abroad. By far the most common are Mastercard and Visa which are accepted pretty much everywhere that accepts any card. One thing to watch is that acceptance of both is not universal nor are both equally accepted in all countries: usually Visa is the best to go with if you’re only taking one but in some countries Mastercard is much more widely accepted and shops that accept one do not always accept the other.

Next up is American Express which is widely accepted in America, Canada and the United Kingdom. Outside those three you would be very unwise to try to use it as your only card. The one big advantage it has is that you can get the card replaced if it’s stolen abroad although you may need to trek quite a bit to find the nearest American Express office where they can do that for you.

Finally there are Diners’ Club and JCB. On the whole, it’s not worth considering Diners Club as the acceptance rate is just far too low. JCB is widely accepted in places where you find Japanese tourists but you’d be better going with Mastercard or Visa as anywhere that accepts JCB will accept them too.

Discover isn’t accepted outside North America. Also worth noting is that cards issued in America or by an American owned bank anywhere are not accepted in Cuba or Vietnam. This obviously includes MBNA (owned by Bank of America) who issue a wide range of affinity cards from their various subsidiaries around the world: check your card agreement to see who is really behind it as it doesn’t always say on the card.

Note that acceptance of cards is neither universal nor universally practical. If you are travelling to countries off the tourist routes you can find that cards aren’t accepted or are only accepted in widely dispersed locations. For example, in India I found that using cards simply wasn’t practical and one family that stayed with us found extreme difficulty in using their American Express card in France (the only card they’d brought) as it’s accepted by less than 10% of the banks and few hotels. The easiest way to check coverage is to look at the Visa or Mastercard sites.

Where these cards really come into their own is in booking hotels and renting cars. You usually can’t guarantee a hotel reservation without having a credit card and you can’t rent a car without one either. Outside of those they can be amongst the cheapest means of getting foreign currency available to you. I say “can be” because you need to know how the banks charge you for using them first.

Bank charges on credit cards come in several basic forms. First, there is the interest that they charge on the credit; if you pay your balance in full each month the majority of cards don’t charge any interest. Some very low rate cards charge from the time of purchase even if you pay in full so check if your rate seems unusually low. Second, they charge transaction fees when you use the card to get cash and will usually charge interest from the date of withdrawal. Typically these fees are around 2% with a minimum charge of £2/$2 per transaction therefore it’s best to withdraw amounts of £100/$100 to minimise this charge. In most cases, there is no transaction charge when you buy things using the card so it’s better to do that instead of withdrawing cash. Thirdly, they usually apply a foreign currency charge which is typically around 3% (no minimum). And, of course, there may be an annual fee for having the card.

Despite all that, it’s still usually cheaper to get cash on a card than to buy travellers cheques as your cost will typically be around 5% max compared to the 7% or so for travellers cheques.

Downsides are basically those charges but, if you’re careful, you can minimise them. For those living in the UK, a Post Office credit card eliminates all but the cash withdrawal charges and if you’re in the American military a USAA card works in much the same way and CapitalOne in America also issues cards with no foreign exchange charge.

This is part of a little series on travel money which has already covered taking cash and will be covering debit cards, cash cards, prepaid cards and what to do when (and it will be when) your cards are stolen.

Less than clear on almost all of the pre-paid travel cash cards sites is what happens when the card expires. In the case of the Post Office card it’s even worse as there’s a customer services line which doesn’t offer any option even remotely like “press X to renew” and Post Office branches have no idea what happens either.

In fact, nothing happens. Your card expires and you’re left unable to access the money. No replacement card comes out, there’s no notification or letter asking what you’d like them to do with the money.

What you need to do is to call the customer services number (on 0845 850 0077 or  +44 207 490 9717) and select the “change my details” option. That puts you through to a real person who can renew your card after you’ve gone through a number of security questions. Well, a LOT of security questions, for most of which your answer will probably “I don’t know”. Things like “what amount did you first load your card with?”, “what date did you last use your card?” and various other questions along those lines which I’m sure few people will be able to answer.

Once you get through that they block your existing card so you’ve no access to the money for, in theory, up to a couple of weeks but in my case for three days. The replacement card has your name printed on it but is otherwise identical to those issued in the Post Office branches; the expiry date on mine is only 18 months on rather than the 2 years that you’re supposed to get but since it’s free that shorter period doesn’t really matter.

Over the last year or so the amount of junk mail I’ve been getting has completely pulled away from my ability to cope with it. Going through anything up to 1000 emails to find anything that was worth reading was just too much and that was after the junk mail filters had done their work.

So, I’ve decided to approach the problem from several different angles.

Step one was changing all the email redirects that I use to go to my bulk mail mailbox which has the strictest junk mail filtering enabled. That thinned out the junk mail considerably  but there’s still quite a lot.

Step two was setting up a brand new mailbox. I’m now in the process of changing the redirects one per day to this mailbox. So far, the mail has remained reasonable but that’s because I’m starting off with the email addresses that were largely personal; when I get to those that were advertised in some way I’ll have to work through the legit ones and change them to something else.

Step three has been in progress for a while alongside the above and consists of deleting the redirects that I don’t really use. Unfortunately, one of these has the problem that it collects a lot of valid email and it also collects an awful lot of junk mail so I’ll need to wade through it all sometime and notify the legit people.

Step four is thinning out the non-junk mail that has also grown to such an extent that it’s unmanageable. Over the course of over 10 years there’s a surprising amount of email subscriptions that build up!

Bit of a hassle but I suppose that trying to stick to the same email for over 10 years was asking a bit too much when initially email addresses were much more visible on the Internet.

Wedding dresses are a bit of a peculiar kind of purchase, aren’t they?

After all, few people would spend anything like the amount of money on any dress never mind a dress that’s intended to be worn only once, would they? Yet, of course, destination wedding dresses are very much a purchase that people aspire to, pretty much regardless of the cost involved.

They’re slightly odd also in that they generally aim to have a strong hint of tradition whilst also trying to be quite fashionable at the same time. That’s not an easy combination to manage which, of course goes some way to explain the high prices for these dresses.

Make sure you make the most of your purchase experience… chances are that it’ll be a long time before you get that much attention when buying something.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that British kids collected money over the Halloween period by wheeling around a dummy and collecting a “penny for the Guy”.

These days though, I doubt that many would even know the phrase or where it originally came from. In case you’re one of those, it’s a phrase commemorating Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up the houses of Parliament as part of the Gunpowder Plot way back in 1605.

There was a vaguely confusing few years when that went out of fashion with nothing to replace it but thanks to the Americanisation of the Halloween period we are firmly in the “trick or treat” era. Still, at least it hasn’t degenerated into the non-traditional cry of “bon bons” (sweeties) of the French who arrived at that with no previous Halloween tradition.

It’s fortunate for us this week anyway in that it’s been pouring for most of this week but was quite pleasant whilst we were walking round with the kids on Halloween night last week.