Travel money: These are the best credit and debit cards to use overseas

Visiting Peru and Argentina, considering an ANZ travel card to load with US dollars. Should I also take some local currency for smaller transactions? H. Temple, Parramatta

I'm not a fan of travel money cards. They don't do anything you can't do with whatever credit and/or debit card you normally use and they whack on fees that sap the purchasing power from your Aussie dollars.

Another fact, every exchange rate transaction is another opportunity for harvesting your funds. For example if you were to use $1000 to buy US dollars, you would get less than $1000 if you were to immediately exchange those US dollars back into our currency.

Since you're proposing to exchange from Aussie dollars to US then to Argentine pesos or Peruvian sol, that's two exchange rate transactions that you'll lose on.

The cards that I use are the 28 Degrees MasterCard for hotel bills and meals and the Citibank Visa Debit Card for withdrawing cash in local currency from ATMs.

Both come with no joining fee, no annual fee and no international transaction fee and their exchange rates are decent.

Argentina and Peru are not major world currencies and therefore it would be difficult to obtain either from Australia.

Use ATMs to make withdrawals in local currency, but take along a small amount of US dollars, perhaps $100 in small denominations.

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