This is a C N A podcast, multi currency card, credit card or cold hard cash. When traveling
multi currency cards,
Top three things to consider when choosing a multi currency app.
What are you gonna use your money for charges? And how many currencies you have access to? Will
you ever travel without cash ever again?
I'll bring my cash along some of it. At least
it's the Money Talks podcast with me Andrea Hing. Now, when planning for a holiday, do you find yourself bringing less cash to the money changer or perhaps you're not even going to the money changer at all? That's because multi currency cards and their accompanying mobile apps have made it so convenient to buy things overseas. Now, for the uninitiated, a multi currency account, lets you transact in multiple currencies using competitive exchange rates and it
promises low transaction fees. They're easy to set up and are even more attractive. Now due to a stronger saying dollar, everyone's traveling now, right? So you can use it even for online shopping. But how much are we really saving by using a multi currency app? How is it different from using your good old credit card. Let's get some answers from someone who's tried and tested various multi currency apps for us. He's co founder of
Financial website, Dollars and Cents. Hey, Dinesh, welcome to the Money Talks
podcast. Hey, thanks for having me on your show. Glad to be here. Now,
when did you start using multi currency apps? Did you start out by holding a bit of standby cash in the wallet and then also having the app on standby or was it full on multi currency at all the
way, like many I eased into it. So at the start, I also applied for a card and then I used it on my first trip just to see how it went. So I didn't go full on, I carry a lot of cash in that instance. But over the years, I find myself trusting it a little more And also having a little bit more options. I think there are about 10 or so kind of multi currency accounts and wallets in Singapore. So I have a couple of them. So I do find myself bringing less cash on my overseas trips nowadays. So,
how many multi currency apps have you tried
a little bit different? I think they're multi currency wallets and then they're also accounts, right. So I think at least half of them that's out there and even the others that I haven't tried, I've done a bit of research on them. What
stood out for you when trying out all these multi currency for
me. The biggest one was how do we want to use multi currency? How do we want to use our foreign currencies if you're traveling? We primarily just want to maybe exchange a little bit earlier than our travel dates. I've heard a lot of people, especially those going Japan this year, they've seen the foreign currency or Japan exchange rates to Singapore being very attractive. So they wanted to change early on.
So I think that's one use case, you just want to keep the multi currency exchange at a good time and then use it when you travel. That's one use case. The other one is also you want to send either local or foreign currencies to a foreign bank account. So you want to send it to like an account in Australia or Indonesia even that's another use case and
not all of them can do all the functions. So you need to know what you want to use the multi currency for either spending traveling, transferring what is
it? Right? So there isn't like a one size fits all type of multi currency application out there. I think
possibly there are a few but depending on your needs, you may want to hold one or two to serve different functions as well.
So are the exchange rates on those multi currency cards or apps or accounts really much better than say, exchanging money at the arcade old school, which is probably the best place to do so in Singapore, right? That's where everyone flocks to and you want to change money,
correct? So we did an interesting article, we literally wanted to see whether the arcade exchange rate was superior to the multi currency account exchange rate. So we did the experiment, someone was at the arcade, someone was on their phone seeing the exchange rate, I believe the exchange rate at that point was just marginally more attractive if you went
down to the arcade. But then you have to consider, if you're not working around the area, to consider traveling down, that would be costly on its own already have to make the time to do it. And the difference might not even make up for like a cap right there. Honestly, it's so marginal.
So not that big of a
difference unless you're changing a lot of money. I don't think it would make a big dent.
What about if we compare multi currency cards to credit cards? Are they equally accepted overseas? Like those credit card ads that we see all the time or convenience and security? Would the multi currency cards have the same have the same function? I'm
not an expert on the foreign spending cards, but how I think about it is that you certainly have to game the system to be able to benefit. So unless you're willing to put in that time and effort to know which exact cards to spend, how to spend it. Which kinds of expenses or brackets of expenses you need to spend it on. You're probably better off not using
your credit cards. So that's how I do it. I don't really want to spend all that time energy effort to do that just to benefit from maybe getting the extra cash back or points.
Okay. But how much are we really saving in terms of transaction fees then? So
I think if you are able to game it, you might see yourself ahead because you're collecting miles or something like that. But let's say those are not in consideration, right? Let's just say you're thinking of spending foreign currencies in maybe cash or your mobile wallets versus a credit card. You are definitely a lot better of spending in your mobile wallets, cash because like you mentioned, there's going to be foreign currency transaction fees,
there's going to be conversion fees as well. If you do spend in a foreign currency, there tends to be at least one if not even to foreign currency conversions. So one for your conversion into USD and then back into S G D. Right. Right. So you want to actually pay in at the end of the day, but they would make that foreign currency into U S D and then into STD to calculate the amount. So that's one way then there's the foreign currency transaction cost anyway.
And then I know there's always this function and when you go on the counter and then you're hit with, do you want to pay in your local currency or do you want to stay in your Singapore dollars? Right. Yes.
And I never know which one to choose.
Yeah. In the same position when it first came out, you know, when they first asked me, I remember this was a long time ago when they first asked me, I didn't have an answer instinctively. I thought if I pay in Singapore dollars, that would be better off. But having done the research, no, actually you always have to pay in the foreign currency. So if you're ever in that situation, just paying the foreign currency,
okay. I'm going to keep that in mind for my next trip. So when you were using all those multi currency cards and you were traveling, did you run into any problems in some places when using
it? I think the biggest problems you might face is one connection to the internet. I was in the U S and I wanted to fill up the gas in the car. So I was at the petrol station and I needed to exchange a certain amount of money. So I think pay and I had already probably expanded everything in my account by the time or maybe I didn't have enough. Right?
So if I didn't have internet connection or if it wasn't very stable, then I couldn't make that instantaneous transfer from my Singapore dollar account into my, I was using you trip at that point into my youtube account and then make that conversion on the youtube app and then use my card to pay. Right. So there's a way you can do it very seamlessly and not have to keep additional foreign currency then you absolutely need. So internet connection is one of them.
The other one is certain places might not accept cards. You know, if you go to a market, you go to certain countries where you can't really find a widespread availability of card acceptance.
The digital infrastructure is not quite there.
Yeah. So that might be an issue
as well. I think it really depends on where you're going. You need to be really at the end of it all. It doesn't hurt to have that standby cash in your pocket.
Yeah, I mean, I would advocate everyone brings standby cash for sure. The cash kind of supplements the cards you spend primarily on the cards and then your cash is just back up emergency, whatever you call it. Was it
strange to have to whip out cash to pay for stuff when you are traveling? Do you think you'll ever travel without cash ever again?
It was a recent trip. I went to Langkawi. It was a very last minute trip for me. Actually, I booked on the day itself. My wife was actually supposed to go and one of her friends backed out on the day. Itself. And then my wife was distraught and just looked at me saying she can't travel. I was like, yeah, sure, I'll go booked on the day itself. I didn't have any Malaysian ringgit with me and I went
there at the airport. I didn't have any money to take local cab back to the hotel, but I could book it on, grab link my card and just pay for it in foreign currency.
So this is what you mean about gaming the system, right? This is another way of doing it without actually having cash available.
So you wouldn't to be able to pay for cap right in your car, right? But since I had no other choice and grab is available there, I could have linked it to any other. Let's say I was in the U S. I linked it to the lift at at the airport itself. So that was fine. So in the digital age that we live in today, I don't think it's a big barrier anymore.
On that note, you said you have to at the current moment and you've tried about half of what's out there in the market already. Should we be getting more than one multi currency card or account? The same way some of us have multiple credit cards and multiple bank accounts
for me. I say why not? So I do use to predominantly but you could even want something that's linked to your local bank account. So even DBS and you'll be, they have, there are multi currency accounts and mobile apps as well. So if you use, you'll be bank and you want your multi currency to be quite seamless, then I think it makes sense. So you don't need a separate app as well. But if you already comfortable using an app,
there's no reason that you need to immediately change. I think it's based on how comfortable, how convenient it is for you. Hello, my name is Steve
Lie and I'm Teresa Tang. And we are the hosts of Sienna correspondent, a podcast that takes you to the heart of the work our correspondents do across the globe from China's COVID response to the Childcare Center massacre in Thailand from the fall of now to the rise of Anwar Ibrahim as Malaysia's Prime Minister, we speak to the people at the reporting front lines. So if you want to know how the biggest global stories unfold, make sure you follow or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
So I read that I can also use a multi currency card to shop online. So right now when I shop overseas website, so any foreign website where I'm looking to buy something right now, I'm just paying the converted sing dollar price on the website because it detects where I'm located, which is Singapore. So it shows me the sing dollar denomination. That's the converted price I'm paying when I'm buying a bag or clothes from my favorite brands overseas. Am I losing money
doing that? Should I have used my multi currency card? Instead? We
did do this experiment a few years ago now where we tried to buy the same pair of shoes three different ways. So we did it with like credit card, we did it with a multi currency account and we bought it in a local versus foreign currency. And we did find like one of the most cost effective ways is to use your multi currency account to pay for it in that foreign currency.
How was it more effective? Okay. You
don't save a huge amount. I personally believe you should always choose the foreign currency because you might get a little bit of a better deal. But in any case, I think if you use the website often enough, you can flip between the to rates and then actually check on your phone whether you're getting a better rate. You can literally do that within a few seconds nowadays. So you can actually negate the effect of that when paying with a foreign or
multi currency account. The part about credit card, I think you definitely worse off if you pay through credit card again because of the same charges that we think it still counts as a foreign currency transaction and then their conversion fees involved as well.
Have you ever encountered paying for something online using the multi currency card and it gets rejected because I know that there are some U S websites that don't even accept our Singapore credit cards. So, have you heard of any stories or experiences where the multi currency card gets rejected for the same reason?
Yeah, I'm just reaching out for my multi currency car. It states Mastercard on it. So it should be on the Mastercard Network. I haven't encountered it to be honest and I think it shouldn't be a big problem because it's on either the Visa Mastercard Network as well, which is globally accepted or available.
So then would you say that multi currency apps or accounts take all the boxes as the top choice to pay for things when traveling or are there certain things that people need to keep in mind,
you need to know what you're using the card or account for? So once you know, using it from my travels, then it's a good way to like exchange money without having to keep stacks of it. Maybe you're going to Japan this year. You see a good exchange rate today. Sometimes we get very caught up in the situation. We just want to change our money as soon as possible or other times like me, I just don't know when is the best time to change it? I don't think
anyone would know because it's hard to guess. Right. So what you can do is you can dollar cost average into the foreign currency, right on your phone itself. So you don't have to continuously go down to the money changer, whether it's arcade or somewhere closer to your place. You don't have to worry about that because you're never going down anyway, just logging into the app and then just exchange it periodically until you actually travel. So then you don't have to
worry about. Are you getting the best exchange rate? You just averaging out the exchange rate that you get? It gives me more comfort knowing I'm doing that. Then secondly, if you want to send it to a bank account overseas, so I actually helped my helper in Singapore send money back home. I think it's much cheaper or more convenient way for her to do it. I think she gets a better deal as well and she doesn't have to queue up foreign currency transfer or
use some other methods at home. Sometimes that's costly.
Um I mean, I've heard of digital remittances. It's a very well developed infrastructure now so they can send money across and have it converted at more competitive rates. So we've talked about using it for traveling. We've talked about using it for online shopping. What are the other various use cases of multi currency apps? What are the transactions? Can we use a multi currency account
for? I think we can think of it to other ways if we just want to hold a foreign currency. My wife is from Hong Kong. So actually just holding or being able to transfer between Singapore and Hong Kong dollars as and when we need so that we can transfer it to her local account of her parents context in Hong Kong or do it similarly in Singapore, except the Hong Kong dollars quite easily. I think that's important if you are maybe an expert or if you have a very deep connection to another country.
So I find that that's a useful account to have other use case scenarios is maybe you just want to hold the currency. So if we have a strong conviction that another currency will appreciate or will perform much better than Singapore dollars, that's an option. Another scenario that I can see as benefiting is if we just want to fund our investments with foreign currencies because we're getting a poor rate with our brokerage is
when we make investments. So we want to fund our brokerage account with us D rather than funded with S G D and then transfer it, make the foreign exchange transfer within the brokerage itself. Okay, tell me more about that. Okay. So in the past, what was common is you just fund your account or pay for your investments in Singapore dollars, right?
By your investments could be a US dollar or Us stock or GBP or Hong Kong dollars could be any of these foreign currencies, but you have to pay for it or you typically pay for it. So the price obviously is charged to you after the foreign currency exchange has been applied. So if you feel like I'm not getting a good deal on this foreign currency exchange that my broker is charging, you could opt for other brokers that accept you to fund account in USD itself. So
that means you are sort of cutting out the middleman in a way or you're just
choosing, cutting out the uncertainty of different exchange transfer, maybe sometimes you don't really know what the amount is going to be. But when you do it yourself, you know exactly what the
amount is okay. That's good advice. Any final parting thoughts as to how listeners can think about using multi currency apps, things like safety risks. For example, I mean, if you're using a smartphone app to transact a lot of stuff, obviously, cybersecurity comes to mind your money is in there, your card details are in there, your personal info is in there. Is that a risk we should look at as well? Yeah,
I think that you hit the nail on the head. You have to take cybersecurity very importantly because there's always a case where you get scanned or there's a fraudulent transaction, which is also why multi currency is great actually because you can think of it as you can only lose how much you already have in your multi currency account. It's not like a credit card where someone's going to charge you up to your limit. You can only lose
what you have inside. Whereas credit card, there might be some ways to get back your funds, you know, to report the transaction that's fraudulent, you can get it back. Whereas in multi currency accounts, you may lose that funds and then take it up with the provider and then see what they can do about it. Right. So there's two ways to think about it passing ports. I think once when I use my multi currency account, there were some like
suspicious transactions going on. But as soon as I reported it, I think they got to it fairly quickly and they reversed the transaction fairly quickly. So I think the ones that in Singapore regulated by Singapore authorities, you can trust them a little bit. They also don't hold your funds, those that aren't banks, they also don't hold your funds as part of their operating cash flow. So they
hold it separately. So they're not using your funds. So in case you're worried that company ever goes back to what happened to your fund, it's not part of their assets, right? They're not going to lose it. And the last thing I have to say is that the seeing works very well for me because I never know when the best time is to exchange my money. And at the same time when I come back in the past, I always tend to feel like I need to spend all my foreign currencies at the airport now because what
am I going to do with this? Yes,
you're always looking for the donation tin in the airport to get rid of your final bits of cash.
Correct? Either donated or by a drain. Find something that cost the exact amount or as close to the exact amount that you have. I think we've all gone through that. So two things, multi currency account helps their one. You can just not think about spending it. You can just transfer everything that is important country back to Singapore dollars to use it here without much of a transaction cost. I think it's quite competitive.
Secondly, you can always just hold it there. It's not like something physical that you store in your drawer once you're home and lose it or forget about it. It still always sits there and whenever you make a foreign currency transactions, let's say you're spending rather than traveling there, you can also use it.
That's right. I guess in a way you can think of it as still physical cash that you come home. You do put it aside except this time it's not going to take up space in your drawer and collect dust. It's digital. You don't have to think about it and you can just keep it and you don't have to worry about whether you're going to get laughed at when you bring that small little amount to the money changer to get it changed back to S G D.
Yeah. Exactly. You can just change it on your app or even spend it
convenient, cashless and creative. Perhaps multi currency apps are the new three CS in the digital age. But are they must? Well, if you're into financial hacks could be worth the time, we hope you gained some nifty tips and tricks on using a multi currency app. And for those, we thank Danny, co founder of Financial website Dollars. And since, and thanks to you to our listener. If you've enjoyed this episode of Money Talks, there's more content
for you to enjoy. Simply follow us on Apple podcasts or Spotify and give us five stars or leave a review while you're there. The team behind Money Talks is Joanne Chan, Jacqueline Chan Christina Robert and I'm Andrea Ping.