Packing the Right Credit Card
Frugal Traveler - A New York Times Blog January 27, 2009, 5:30 pm Traveling frugally means more than just cadging free bar snacks in Bologna or hopping low-cost flights between third-tier European airports. To keep costs to a minimum, you have to plan well in advance, and that means getting your finances in order. The Frugal Traveler's wallet. The first thing you'll want to do is apply for a new credit card. See, most card issuers charge fees for overseas transactions. American Express, for example, adds 2.7 percent to every overseas transaction (up from 2 percent last summer), while Bank of America, Chase, Citibank and HSBC tack on 3 percent, according to Curtis Arnold, who runs CardRatings.com, a Web site that tracks credit card fees. These fees not only include in-store purchases but all transactions made abroad, so even if you're buying something on the Web from the warm confines of your home, you still get hit with a fee if the Web site processes the purchase through a foreign bank. There are ways around this. Discover, for example, charges no fees, but is not as widely accepted abroad as Visa, MasterCard and American Express. In December, Charles Schwab Bank, a corporate sibling of the brokerage house, introduced a credit card that charges no transaction fees and puts 2 percent cash back into a brokerage account. My old standby, however, is Capital One, which charges no fees of its own and even eats the Visa charge. Customer service can be a little awkward, and I've spent as much as 30 minutes on hold just to tell them I'm going abroad (necessary to keep my purchases from being flagged as potentially fraudulent), but I guess that's the price you pay for saving money. ... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/packing-the-right-credit-card/ *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
