Traveling with My Credit Card

Throughout the year, there are many opportunities and reason for travel. In the summer, you and your family may want to go on a memorable family vacation or you and your significant other may wish to take a romantic vacation away to an exotic location. During the fall and winter, there are numerous holidays that may call for travel to visit with relatives, while the springtime brings with it a desire to get out of the house and explore. No matter the season, traveling with a credit card is a almost a necessity and quite honestly, a wiser choice.

My family and I enjoy taking vacations throughout the year. I believe it is important to get the kids out there so they can see that there is much more to this world than our hometown. Similarly, my husband and I enjoy the time away together away from the stresses of work and the day-to-day grind. But, I would never dream of going on a vacation without my credit card. In fact, we usually take only a small amount of cash in order to cover those inevitable little purchases that just cannot be made with a credit card. Otherwise, it is credit all the way!

Before you start thinking that we are just poor saps who can’t afford to pay for our vacation so we must put it on a credit card, let me clarify. It’s not that we can’t pay for the vacation, it’s just that it is actually a lot safer to use the credit card. If I lose a credit card while on vacation (which I actually did on our most recent vacation to Mackinaw Island), I only need to make one simple phone call to cancel the card and my worries are over. If I lose cash, on the other hand, I can just kiss it goodbye because I most likely will never see it again. Not only that, a credit card makes it easy for me to see just how much money we spent while on vacation because it is all summarized in one easy statement at the end of the month.

When it comes to traveling abroad, however, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, you can really get hammered with international fees on your credit card. In fact, your credit card might sack you with a fee equivalent to as much as 10% of your purchases. 1-3% of this fee is often referred to as a “foreign currency-conversion fee,” which is the fee you pay to have the currency of the country in which you are making purchases converted to US currency. In addition to this fee, merchants might add on an extra 6% or so for converting the currency as well. So, check into your credit card before traveling abroad to keep your fees as low as possible.

One card I have found that is great for traveling abroad is Capital One because the card doesn’t charge a merchant foreign exchange fee. In addition, it doesn’t pass on the “foreign currency-conversion fee” charged by Visa or MasterCard. American Express is also pretty good because it only charges a 2% fee. So, do your homework before traveling away from home and you will be sure to have a great vacation at the best cost possible.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.