Medan Kota

This is a new thing that I have just found out.. something to think about

Imagine, you are going on 2 weeks holidays to Australia, America or Europe..  most of us would then need to change our Indonesia Rupiah to the according currencies… so, with 2 weeks of holidays, you probably be carrying the cash in thousands of dollars around … all along, worrying of losing, robbery, pick pocket etc…

Then to consider purchasing goods with credit cards, the exchange rates are some 3%-5% higher…

Then to think of just using the ATM to simply withdraw cash, we will then be charged twice, the exchange rate as well as the cost of drawing the fund.. these will be converting from the Rupiah in your Indonesia account..

but Here’s the trick… to avoid all of the above..

what you can do is that, you open a Citibank foreign account.. i.e AUS$, US$, or the EUR (no minimum balance needed and no charges) …..  ask for an ATM card for the account…  from there, you buy the currencies needed using the bank T/T rate (which is cheaper than changing your Rupiah at the money changer).. and have the money deposit into the foreign account…

so assuming, I am going on holidays to Australia, I will arrange to buy AUS$ using T/T rate.. the money is kept in my AUS$ account….  and before I leave for the holidays, I will ask Citibank to link my given ATM card to my AUD$ account… with that, when I arrive in Australia, I will just withdraw the cash as needed at any Citibank ATM machine or any machine with the ATM Bersama logo which can be found everywhere..

I stumple upon the solution as we have plan to go there for holidays since, the Australia $ is cheap at the moment.  But when I called up money changer, they are charging me some Rp1000 more than the rate since they are running low on the notes… so to avoid the problem, I was twisting my brain at the bank and talking to the banker and it just click me…

so really.. I have been dumb for a long long time… in fact, this apply to any country that the bank allows you to hold the country’s currency…  but you just have to remember to inform the bank to link the ATM card to the according account..

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