Published Online: December 31, 2010
When Sarah and I started looking, in earnest, at living in Switzerland for a year, our minds eventually came to wondering about how we would handle our finances. Should we get a bank account in Switzerland or should we just bring cash and a gun? We scoured the Internet looking for information from other expatriates and frequent travelers to see what they had found.
Cash Access
First, we decided that ATM access to our checking account was a necessity if our funds were to be kept in the United States. After researching different checking accounts that had the lowest international ATM usage fees, we discovered the Charles Schwab High Yield Investor Checking account. According to uncle Chuck’s site, the account claimed (and I’m quoting direct from the site here), “No ATM fees. Schwab Bank will reimburse you for any fees charged by other banks.” Deeper in their website, they write the following:
We don’t charge any ATM fees and we reimburse any ATM fee you are charged—worldwide. While the ATM screen may say something like “you will be charged $2 for this transaction. Proceed?” Just click yes and we’ll refund that charge to your account.
Apart from that, the account earned interest (at the time we applied, it was a mere 0.25% Variable APY). The only thing we were leery about is that the account required you to have a Schwab One Brokerage account. It doesn’t require you to use or even fund the account, but you have to open one if you don’t already have one (which we didn’t).
Credit Card Access
While looking around for a credit card to use internationally, a few things became immediately apparent:
- Visa and MasterCard are both widely accepted in Europe.
- Most credit cards providers (i.e. Chase, MBNA, Citibank, Bank of America, etc.) will charge you 1-3% on foreign currency transactions for the service of exchanging your US dollars to the local currency during a purchase transaction.
- Credit card processors (i.e. Visa, MasterCard, etc.) will add an additional 1% fee to foreign transactions on top of the fee issued by the credit card provider.
That means that each time you use your credit card to make a transaction in a foreign country, you can expect to add an additional 3% on to that transaction for credit card fees. Fortunately, there is one provider that we found that waives those charges. Capital One issues cards with a promise of “no foreign transaction fees.” They go on to say:
When abroad, use your Venture card to make purchases with none of the foreign transaction fees you find on other cards.
I called and spoke to a representative who assured me this meant what I thought it meant. A quick web search revealed that other people seemed to claim that this was true.
There are a variety of Capital One cards available, and they all have the same claim, to take your choice. We opted for the Capital One Venture card.
Getting To The Point…
At this point, it seems the options we have found will suit our financial needs in Switzerland. No ATM fees and no foreign transaction fees seems like a pretty good deal to us. We’re always open to finding the best opportunity at the time. If you have any thoughts, leave them below. And we’ll be sure to update this page with any additional thoughts as we begin to use these accounts.
Happy Traveling!