We are on an open ended, non-stop world trip as a family, so had to make up some of our own ways of handling money. We do have a capital one card ( and others) but almost never use credit cards.

We use several banks including ones that are off shore and ones that allow us to use many currencies. By paying close attention to currency levels we saved a ton of money by mostly getting out of the US dollar before we left in 2006 and using things like the British pound when it was high ( and getting out of it before it fell). That helped allow us to travel cheaply in Europe when the dollar was so low and the euro and pound high.

Personally, unless we are just passing through, we always try to exchange currency at the local banks as they tend to provide the best exchange rates. We also setup separate accounts to protect ourselves both from impulse buying and theft.

Thanks!

We took cash stashed in small denominations throughout our luggage, credit card – made sure it would earn us some air miles – two debit cards each plus a to Travelex Cash Passport Cards, which were really useful. Online banking was essential too.

We had no problems in South America, but India was a different case. We told our bank (Lloyds TSB, UK) that we were going to be in India as their policy is to automatically block a card if it’s used there. They refused to stop the automatic block, telling us that we’d need to phone from India to get our card unblocked after trying to use it. Real pain in the arse, especially as it happened repeatedly. The Travelex card and the credit card turned out to be invaluable.

But the last time we tried them, it was terrible. I’d bought Traveler’s cheques to avoid duplicate exchange fees. – The long story is that we were visiting Ecuador, a USD country, and had converted a lot of money in advance to take advantage of a good exchange rate. But you cannot connect an ATM card to a Canadian bank account denominated in foreign currency. Converting back to Canadian dollars to be able to withdraw USD from an ATM would have come close to wiping out the exchange gain we made.

So traveler’s cheques it was, and every attempt to cash them required running around town, as even in the big cities, there was generally only a single exchange office that would cash them, and often the tellers in banks and cash-only exchange offices wouldn’t know where it was. Hours were spent on this. Never again.

The only backup to cards is cash. A hidden stash of USDs or – some places – Euros.

We also have credit cards for backup, as well as some dollars for when ATMs aren’t available. We have a few traveller’s cheques too – just in case!

Also agree about scanning and emailing yourself all the cards. I was robbed once and wanted to report it to my bank but didn’t know the phone number (on the back of the card) or the card number!