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.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

If you’re going a fair distance and will be in a country where you have relatives then chances are that you’ll have to see them.

However, don’t forget that this can substantially distort “your” holiday. For one thing, if you’re going far enough they’ll probably feel obliged to organise lots of stuff for you to see and do whilst you’re there. If they’re cousins who you’ve never seen or perhaps ones who you’ve only seen at home and this is a return visit then you can pretty much forget about going to where you might want to go.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have them offer to take you around various places but you can sometimes end up getting dragged round all the relatives in the area which can seriously eat up holiday time. If that looks likely to happen you need to be clear on why you’re going to visit them: is it because you’re going to that country anyway and dropping in to say “hi”, or is it specifically to see them? The answer makes an enormous difference. For example, we were going around the world once and planning on dropping in to see one family along the trip but some people over here couldn’t understand why we weren’t spending our entire holiday with them!

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Barclays Bank bought the Woolwich Building Society around seven years ago but really did very little to integrate the two outfits until now. In fact, the only visible changes until a year ago were that the Woolwich stopped issuing credit cards under its own name and various documents started having “a trading name of Barclays Bank” or words to that effect added to them.

The original reason put forward for their purchase was to acquire the technology that Woolwich used to implement its excellent Open Plan account, an account that let you offset any savings that you have against your mortgage. Not really a great reason on the whole as the Woolwich technology was extremely primitive even then and, though operational, did silly things like charge you interest when you wrote a cheque against money that you actually had in a linked savings account and then refunding that the following month.

In due course, Barclays ran up a version for themselves and improved the offering from the Woolwich.

However, they got around to fully integrating the Woolwich into Barclays so all existing Woolwich accounts last year and the Woolwich accounts don’t exist anymore. Snag is, that the Woolwich offered a number of quite sophisticated savings accounts and Barclays only has very simple ones.

Naturally, Barclays is putting this across as a series of “improvements”. They list 10, so let’s look at each one:

1. You’ll have over 30,000 staff waiting to help you including many who are presently serving customers in the Woolwich.

So, you’ll have Barclays staff to look to. OK, more people, so let’s count that as a real improvement

2. You can use any of the 1,700 or so Barclays branches in the country and any Barclays Hole in the Wall machines.

You could do that before the merger so that’s hardly an improvement.

3. You’ll have access to Barclays telephone and online banking*, so it’s easy to manage your money when our branches are closed.

Woolwich already have phone and online banking, so that’s not an improvement.

4. You can get the same tailored service you expect from your Woolwich branch, only more so you can book an appointment with one of our Personal Bankers. And our specialists will help to make sure that all your financial needs are covered.

Actually, you’ve been able to do that for around eight years now.

5. You can choose anything from a wide range of Barclays products and specialist services.

You’ve always been able to do that.

6. You can also arrange your foreign currency and International Money Orders at any Barclays branch, at our Bureaux de Change or by calling the Barclays Travel Line on 0845 600 8090**.

You’ve always been able to do that, though hardly a recommendation given their charges.

7. You will also have peace of mind of knowing that your money remains safe with us. For instance, we offer free security software to active online customers.

OK, we’ll give them that one.

8. Barclays has a broader range of products and services so we can help you with your business finances as well as your personal ones.

Actually, it offers a narrower range of products though it does do business finance so let’s count that as a plus.

9. We also do more in the community. Spaces for Sports is just one example we’re investing over £30 million in helping communities to transform their sporting facilities in the UK.

Well, if memory serves, the Woolwich was pretty active in supporting local communities before it was taken over.

10. The same friendly staff will be there, helping us to stay one of the top 20 big companies in Britain to work for.

So, no change is counted as an advantage of the change?

However, what about the accounts that are changing. In fact, almost every single one is being downgraded.

Cardsaver

A very popular account which offers a Visa Electron debit card and pays quite good interest.

This becomes a savings account which offers (on request) a card which will only work in Barclays machines in the UK. Moreover, it will no longer be possible to get counter cheques so if you want to withdraw more than the cash machine limit (reduced from £400 to £300), you’ll need to open a Barclays current account. Oh, and you can’t make deposits in the ATMs any more.

So, this account has been “improved” by removing nearly all the facilities from it for which people selected it.

Open Plan for Savers

I suspect that the Barclays people have completely forgotten about this account.

This was even better in some ways as the Cardsaver account. It gave you on a savings account, a chequebook and full Visa debit card plus the ability to setup up to 12 separate savings accounts within it, each of which could have individual standing orders and direct debits against them.

This becomes a standard savings account which offers (on request) a cash card which will only work in Barclays machines and, again, a reduced limit of £300 per day. Of course, you can’t make deposits in the ATMs either.

If I’m right that they have forgotten about this account, it will cause chaos for those people who have it. All of a sudden their direct debits won’t get paid for a start. If they have remembered about it, I’d say that it could be rather a difficult account to map onto the Barclays range as it offers the equivalent to having up to 12 separate current accounts.

Almost all of the downsides arise from the fact that Woolwich was basically a savings institution when it was taken over whereas Barclays is a commercial bank. The effect of this is that the Woolwich had a much more sophisticated range of savings accounts and it would have been far simpler had Barclays adopted these rather than downgrading the accounts across the board.

After all, when the Halifax bought the Bank of Scotland, the accounts available to everyone in both institutions really did improve. But then, the Halifax was the savings institution and well aware that peoples’ savings needs aren’t met well by the offerings of banks. The Halifax/Bank of Scotland now offers everything that was on offer by both parties and indeed many products have been significantly improved by the takeover.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

For various reasons the majority of online booking systems in Europe are run by UK based companies which means that we regularly get phone calls from them during the peak holiday season.

Almost without fail, they start off in French which is fair enough as they’re phoning a French hotel. However, we know they’re from the UK since we see the phone number before we answer the phone so we always start off in English.

What’s really surprising is how long the brits keep going in, usually, bad French before it dawns on them that we’ve been talking English to them from the start. Even when the penny does drop, their first question afterwards is “do you speak English”!

Isn’t it peculiar how our brains work like that?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

With flight prices so high these days it’s always useful to find ways to save money and one of the most effective is to travel “in reverse”.

What’s that mean? Well, the number of people leaving on holiday is usually at its peak on Saturday and similarly at a peak coming back on Friday. So, the thing to do is to travel out on the Friday and back on the Saturday. One family staying with us at the moment managed to save EUR 400 by doing that.

Not only will this save money but you’ll find the journey a lot more pleasant. On flights you’ll not be fighting over seats and on the motorways you’ll not be constantly stuck in traffic.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.