Just interested to hear what others do for travel money when going abroad.
We're off to France, Switzerland (one night stop over) and Italy later in the year so I'm mainly interested in Euros though I'll take a few Swiss francs. Previously I've just had whatever the max Euro's I think I'll want delivered, stashed most of it in a safe in the car with just daily spending money in my wallet, paid cash for almost everything while away and then changed the surplus notes back to pounds when I get back. Previous trips were for 10 days with just me to pay for so I only took £1500, this trip is 16 days with wife and daughter spending money as well so probably double the cash to keep safe ...
All of the bank accounts / debit cards we have charge obscene amounts for foreign transactions so they're emergency use only really. I'm looking at cards like the FairFX Euro card which you load with money up front but can also reload via SMS so in theory I can load it with the minimum expected spend and top it up when that's obviously not enough Still seems like a bit of a balancing act between what's loaded on the card for the bigger spends like fuel vs cash in the pocket for general spending and would be simpler to just take a big wad of cash ...
So, what do other folks do?
We're off to France, Switzerland (one night stop over) and Italy later in the year so I'm mainly interested in Euros though I'll take a few Swiss francs. Previously I've just had whatever the max Euro's I think I'll want delivered, stashed most of it in a safe in the car with just daily spending money in my wallet, paid cash for almost everything while away and then changed the surplus notes back to pounds when I get back. Previous trips were for 10 days with just me to pay for so I only took £1500, this trip is 16 days with wife and daughter spending money as well so probably double the cash to keep safe ...
All of the bank accounts / debit cards we have charge obscene amounts for foreign transactions so they're emergency use only really. I'm looking at cards like the FairFX Euro card which you load with money up front but can also reload via SMS so in theory I can load it with the minimum expected spend and top it up when that's obviously not enough Still seems like a bit of a balancing act between what's loaded on the card for the bigger spends like fuel vs cash in the pocket for general spending and would be simpler to just take a big wad of cash ...
So, what do other folks do?