"How much should I take" usually turns into an estimate of spending per day. For the total, though, it often matters more what form the money is in — because more goes on rates and fees than people expect.
Where the money leaks
There are three places where you pay a margin, and it is easy to pay all three on one trip:
- Buying foreign currency at home — you pay the bureau's sell rate.
- Withdrawing cash from a foreign ATM — your bank's fee plus, as a rule, the ATM operator's own charge.
- Conversion at the terminal — when a card machine offers to charge you "in your own currency", that is a conversion at a rate set by the merchant, and it is almost always worse than your card's.
The third is the most expensive and the easiest to avoid: always choose the local currency.
A split that usually works
- Cash for small things: transport, markets, places that do not take cards, tips. For a week in the eurozone that is typically €100–200.
- Card for everything larger — accommodation, restaurants, tickets, fuel. A card's rate is normally closer to the reference rate than a bureau's.
- A reserve you do not plan to spend, in cash, kept separately from the rest.
How big a reserve
Ten percent over plan covers the ordinary overshoots — a pricier taxi, one more dinner, a ticket nobody counted. Twenty makes sense if you are going somewhere whose currency you do not follow, or if the plan includes something you cannot check in advance.
A reserve is not a budget: if you have already spent it in your head, it is not a reserve.
Buying the local currency in advance
For the eurozone, buying euros before you go is straightforward and usually fine.
For anywhere outside it — Turkey, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, most of Asia — buying the local currency at home is generally a poor deal. Spreads on a currency are widest far from where it is used, because the bureau holding it has to assume it will sit in a drawer. Carry euros or dollars and change on arrival, or simply pay by card in the local currency.
Two checks before you leave
- Tell your bank you are travelling if it still requires that, and check what it charges for foreign withdrawals and purchases. Those two numbers decide whether cash or card is cheaper for you specifically.
- Look at the pair's range over the past year. Not to time anything — just to know whether the rate you are getting today is near the top or the bottom of where it has been. That is a two-second check that occasionally changes how much you convert.
After the trip
Compare a couple of card charges on your statement against the reference rate for those dates. A gap much wider than your bank's stated fee means dynamic currency conversion was applied somewhere — worth knowing before the next trip.
Last updated:
Related articles
The one question at a foreign card terminal that costs you the most
When a terminal or an ATM abroad offers to charge you in your own currency, the answer is almost always no. Here is why, and what it costs.
How an exchange rate is actually formed
There is no exchange, no opening bell and no single price. Where the number comes from, who sets it, and why two sources can both be right.
Sending money across borders — three costs, not one
With international transfers almost everyone looks at the exchange rate, which is usually the smallest of three costs. Here are the other two.
Frequently asked questions
How an exchange rate is actually set, what a spread costs on a real transaction, what happens when your income and your debt are in different currencies, and what to check before paying or being paid abroad. They explain mechanisms rather than forecast rates, and each one carries the date it was last revised at the top.
No. We publish no forecasts, price targets or trading calls, and no article recommends buying or selling a currency. Exchange rates over short horizons are close to unpredictable, and a site that pretends otherwise is selling something. What the articles do instead is explain the mechanism, so that you can read the news for yourself.
They are written by the kursdanas.rs editorial team. We accept no commissioned or sponsored articles, and advertising has no influence on what is published or on the order of anything in our tables. Where an article states a figure it names the source, and where we get something wrong we correct it and change the revision date shown on the page.