July 2009 Weddings
Kate&Mark
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Question for the girls who travel abroad
M's concerned about international fees on our credit card. The vast majority of the trip will be paid for ahead of time, so we'll really just be using the credit cards for 2 nights hotel and some meals/shopping.
Did your credit card company charge international fees? Did they add up to a lot?
Do you think it would be worth it to open up a card with no international fees for a 2 week trip? (It's got an annual fee attached...)
Re: Question for the girls who travel abroad
Yes, our cards all charge an international conversion fee or whatever it's called. I think it was like 3%. We try not to use our credit cards so often when overseas, but opt to stick our ATMs in an ATM and withdraw the currency, however, we still got hit with the fee from our bank too, and an ATM fee when using a non-network ATM. Because we have a military credit union, certain ATMs on the American military bases wouldn't charge the fee, but obviously you won't have that option.
This last trip, the fees added up to about $50 in total I think. Not awful, but still, I would have preferred none. I told T the last time we went to Europe that we should consider getting a card with no fees, but he didn't think we'd ever be going again...yeah, okay...
Have you looked into the Capital One Venture card? I think there's no annual fee and I thought there were no international conversion fees either. I had looked into that one briefly when I was trying to convince him to get one, plus it's good on domestic travel as well and I thought it would be good for us since we travel all the time, but he shot it down and opted for another rewards card.
We have the Capital One Venture Card that Yvonne mentioned, and there are no international fees associated with it. We get 2 rewards points for every dollar that we spend, and we put everything we can on our card and pay it off in full every month. There is an annual fee associated with it ($60 or $80, I think), but we rack up a lot of rewards, so I think it's worth it. I don't think any Capital One cards charge international fees, though I could be wrong.
We did get charged fees to use our regular ATM cards, so I also set up a money market/bank account through Capital One before our Europe trip to avoid those. Now that our trip is over, we don't really use it, but we'll have it for future trips.
I'm going to have to look into this! I already have a capital one card so that would be fantastic.
Kate's Recipe Box || Relatively Bookish
We also don't have an annual fee on ours. I just went to look at it, and it does just say plain old Capital One on it.
ETA: I was also able to find "sister" banks for our bank when we were over there that didn't charge us fees to withdraw from the ATM, we just had to pay the conversion rate of course.
I think our cards (through our bank) is like $2 a transaction... So it adds up fast. We tend to limit using cards to just a handful of times. Instead we tend to go to an ATM and pull out cash to use every few days. That way we end up only incurring a few fees.
I wouldn't bother opening a credit card with no international fees unless I was traveling for more than 3 weeks abroad.
I never got charged an extra fee when I used my Visa either. I think it all depends on what agreement you had when you signed up for the card. You can probably call and talk them into getting rid of the international fees if you find out that you will be charged with them.
I know I'm late on replying to this, but I thought I'd chime in anyways
We have a Capital One card, it gives us some travel rewards, but doesn't charge us a fee. We never have international transaction fees with this card.
As for getting cash from an ATM, your bank may, or may not charge a fee, depending on the bank and the agreement you had originally (or whatever it is that they changed it to after you signed up). We opened a Schwab Investor Checking account just for this because even if YOUR bank doesn't charge a fee, many ATMs abroad will...the most we've seen is nearly $6 with a withdraw limit of only $300...and that really adds up. The Schwab account REFUNDS us all the money that the other banks charge us for using their ATM's. This has literally saved us more than $50 each month over the last 6 months.
There are very few Schwab branches, but we opened the account online and used the telephone support when we needed. I have never been so pleased with a bank...
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