How we access our Money while Travelling

This a very personal thing. I will tell you how we work our accounts and why. We use a number of accounts and this is because we need to know that if one stops working or is compromised we have other options.

Up front I just want to say we have no affiliation with any banks. This is just our personal experience.

So who do we use?

I did a lot of searching when we needed to start transferring money across to foreign accounts. HSBC, have what is called a “Global Account”. I just love this one. We can transfer money across in Australian dollars instantly, and then when we are ready we can move it across to Euro or Pound Sterling, depending on where we are travelling at the time. What I love about this is that I just keep the money sitting in Australian dollars and I check the exchange every day. I request to move money from one currency account to another, if I don’t like the exchange rate I abort and try again the next day.

I also like that if I’m not going to be in the UK for example, for a while, and I have pound sterling in my account, I can just move the Pound Sterling that is left in the account across to the Euro account instead of it just sitting there doing nothing. The global account has no fees unless you are transferring foreign money overseas, which is a given with anyone transferring overseas. I compared the fees with others and found that HSBC is a fraction better. For me the exchange rate is better than most other bank accounts, generally by at least one cent up, sometimes up to three cents in the dollar.

This account is also easy for sending funds electronically overseas (for example when you are purchasing a motorhome … ha ha). I have transferred funds overseas from two other bank accounts, I have also used Wise and PayPal, and I personally found HSBC the easiest to use.

All transactions are done from the same account number. If you have three seperate currency’s, lets say Euro, Pound Sterling and Australian dollars, it will take the currency that the country you are in uses. It looks like you have three seperate accounts when you go into your banking, but they are all under the one account number. Occasionally some systems will ask you which currency you want to use but most of the time this doesn’t happen. If you run out of Euro it will try to take the currency from you Australian dollars account.

Rarely, but it does happen, in some shops it doesn’t accept the physical card, however when this happens it will generally work if you have your card saved on your phone and you use it through PayWave instead. I don’t know why this happens but it took a while for us to work this one out. It can even happen the other way around, the card on your phone won’t work but the actual physical card will.

If you are in Europe and you spend over 100 euro and you pay with your physical card you will often need to sign a docket. If you use PayWave you won’t need to sign a docket.

Petrol stations seem to be a bit of an issue for us (these are ones that don’t have a kiosk and you pay from the bowser). It took trial and error for me to work out why this was an issue. For some reason when you are buying petrol the system they use doesn’t access the currency you are using it just accesses the main account which is in Australian dollars, and we more often than not don’t have anything in that account. So when we buy diesel we use now use a seperate visa card which I keep just for these purchases.

There are no frequent flyer or any type of rewards with the HSBC card. I found that because the exchange rate is better than anything else I have found, and there are no fees with the account, that this works out to be the best deal for us.

I have always chased the frequent flyer points but it doesn’t matter which account you use, they come at a cost, whether it be fees, exchange rate or annual card fee.

And to be honest, I feel much more comfortable when I look in the account and I can see the balance in Euros. It makes budgeting that much easier.

We also have a couple of credit cards which we can use which do have frequent flyer rewards but the exchange rate is never that great, so we only use these if we are in a pickle.

I used to use Qantas Money and the rewards are great buy I have personally found the exchange rate to be pretty poor in comparison to the HSBC card so I rarely use it now. But I do have it as a back up.

We still have an account with one of the Big 4 banks in Australia, but this again we only use if we need to.

Once, we have found that none of our cards worked in an aires in France when we needed to purchase power or water. This isn’t a big problem though because most aires use tokens if you have to pay, which we always have a supply of. It’s rare to find one that uses credit cards only, in our experience so far. I spoke to someone in broken French and I think they were telling me that the particular aires we were at only accepted European cards.

All I can say is do your homework when looking for the right account for you. When you are transferring money regularly because you are living in Europe, the small difference in exchange rate, monthly fees or annual fees really adds up. It’s not the same as being on holidays. What we are using to live full-time in Europe is not what we used when we holidayed for a month at a time.