It’s easy to lose money while traveling. Exchanging money is not for the inexperienced. Conversions are purposely made complicated and countries do not go over the top to make sure that visitors are not being taken advantage of. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up.
Every ATM is Different – Generally, using the first ATM you see after the train or plane is going to be the worst. I noticed that EuroNet seems to be the biggest culprit. ATM’s that offer the best ones are provided by the banks. For example, and remember I knew this going into this trip, I was going to get some cash to pay for a train ticket (just use a credit card) and went to an ATM that I believed would be fair. I enter my pin and request $100 Euro expecting for the machine to ask me if I accept the surcharge. Negative. The machine processed the transaction by spitting out money for me. Looking at my bank statement, they charged me $33 dollars on an $100 withdrawl. I had no chance to decline and no alert to what was the fee. Another time I had the ATM say it was 9% transaction fee, but i was able to cancel. Find ATM’s associated with banks.
ATM’s Dispense Big Bills – This is extremely annoying but when I got $100 USD out of the ATM, the Czech equivalent was around 2,500 Koruna. It spit out a 2,000 Koruna. I can’t spend a 2,000 Koruna bill anywhere. So now I’m looking for places to cut it down into smaller bills which as a foreigner, is annoying. Noting that currency conversions wouldn’t even do it.
Converting Cash are Scams – I had 75 Euros from Frankfurt and needed to convert to the Czech Koruna. There is a cash conversion that had a Western Union sign that I wanted to check out. I walk up and put the 75 Euro down and they scoop it up and say it’s worth 1,300 Czech. I showed them my Google conversion that it’s worth 1,900 Czech. I said, please give me the money back. The person inside said that she has no idea what Google conversion is. She points to her sign. I asked for my money back again and she was not giving it back. At this point there were 2 people behind me, she wasn’t giving me my money back, and was speaking broken English. I don’t expect a full conversion, but I’d say 400 Czech was taken from me ($17 USD).
Conversions are Confusing – 100 USD are worth 30,000 Hungarian Forint. My meal of an order of wings and 5 beers was 8,000 Forint. When they tell you it’s 8,000, you have no idea how much money that is. I gave them 10,000 Forint and the guy shook my hand because that tip must have been outrageous. I’m sure that once you spend more time it becomes easier, but at first glance, it’s confusing. Even when I tried to drill into my head that 100 Czech Koruna was worth around 4 dollars, I would still get confused when I saw a T-shirt was 500 CZK. I know it sounds easy, but it takes some time to understand.
The bottom line, at least the way I would look at it (CK4 would disagree), is that you are going to lose money in foreign places. It’s unavoidable. As long as you can sleep at night knowing this, you’ll be ok.