Must-Do Financial Prep Before International Travel

As November approaches, my husband Tom and I are getting ready to leave for a 6-week international journey to Spain. We are SO excited, but also trying to get our travel “groove” back since it’s been a while.

Since we are thinking about prepping our “financial house” for being MIA for about 6 weeks, I wanted to write this post about how you can prepare financially for long term travel.

As we know, travel costs money and your life doesn’t just stop while you’re on the road. As easy as it is to forget about your financial and administrative obligations back home. However, there are simple ways to set yourself up for success and make sure that pesky tasks don’t suck up your time and energy.

Here’s some simple things you can do to prepare financially before a big trip:

1. Give Your Bank a Head’s Up

For many banks, it’s a best practice to put in an international travel notice. This notifies them that you’re traveling internationally so they don’t flag your charges as fraudulent.

To put in a travel notice with your bank, normally you can login to your online portal and add it to your account. Just Google “Your Bank Name” + “Travel Notice” to find instructions.

Some banks don’t require travel notices. It is my opinion that the better financial technology gets, the less commonplace this will be. However, better safe than sorry.

Pro tip: make sure to do this for any credit cards you’ll be taking also!

2. Have A Plan For International Cash Withdrawals

Cash is still king in many foreign countries. There’s a 99.9% chance you’ll need cash at some point during your international travels. However, using your debit card at a foreign ATM can be super expensive! Not to mention, you may end up getting a crappy foreign exchange rate, on top of the transaction fee. Ugh!

To avoid this, look into banking options such as the Charles Schwab checking account, which offers unlimited ATM fee rebates worldwide and no foreign transaction fees. 

Wise, which offers a borderless debit card is another great option, but it does start to charge a 2% fee if you withdraw over $100 USD per month. However, this is still much cheaper than most other options.

With these accounts, you can use them at pretty much any ATM around the world and avoid high fees.

As a note, foreign ATMs will often offer to do your currency conversion for you. DENY this when you see it, as it’s typically cheaper for your bank to do the conversion instead of the foreign ATM.  

3. Prepare To Get Local Currency Upon Arrival

When you are preparing to travel, I do recommend bringing cash with you, even if it’s just USD to be safe. Before you leave, look up your arrival city’s amenities to see if you can use a ride-sharing service like Uber, or if you can pay with credit/debit card for public transit. If that is the case, you can skip out on getting local currency beforehand and wait until you arrive at your accommodation.

If you do need to get cash immediately upon arrival to pay for transportation from the airport, most airports have local ATMs. These are good options if you’re using a debit card like Schwab or Wise, mentioned above. This is normally what Tom and I do as soon as we land in a new country.

However, DO NOT use the airport kiosks that advertise foreign currency exchange. The rates you’ll be getting are predatory at best. (Read: rip-off city!)

Another option is to order foreign currency from your bank before you leave. This takes a couple of weeks of advance planning and typically is not necessary.

4. Check Your Mail Remotely

Don’t neglect your financial obligations at home! Especially if you are a business owner or freelancer, you don’t want to forget about your mail just in case tax notices or unexpected bills come through. 

If you will be away from home for more than 2 weeks, I recommend doing the following:

- Entrust a family member or friend to collect your mail and send a weekly summary to you. Give them permission to open anything Important and send you a picture.

-Use a mail forwarding and mail scanning service like Post Scan Mail to collect mail on your behalf and scan it to you. This is an excellent idea if you’re a digital nomad and planning on traveling frequently.

Pro tip: make sure you’ve set all of your financial accounts to “paperless billing” to reduce the unnecessary paperwork. Not only can you do this for bank accounts, but also for 401K and IRA accounts.

5. Track Your Expenses

Don’t forget about your budget! If you’ve planned well, you’ve likely used our Trip Planning and Budgeting Template, or a similar tool to create your trip budget.

As you’re traveling, make sure to continue to track your expenses using a tool such as Travel Spend (hoping to try this during our Spain trip and will report back), YNAB, or Every Dollar. If you’re low tech like we were during our first long-term trip, we kept a note of our spending on our phone, and then reconciled it with our online banking. 

Either way you decide to track your expenses, it’s very important to be able to quickly tailor your spending if you’re going over budget. It’s also important to make sure that you are staying on top of your banking activity to prevent any fraudulent activity.

Protip: also set up auto pay for any expense you will still be incurring back home. Some examples are rent, utilities, insurance, and debit payments.

Obviously, you don’t want to ruin your trip stressing about your budget. However, knowledge is power, and it’s fun to have data to look back on when planning for future travels. OK, maybe fun isn’t the right word when you aren’t a numbers nerd, but I promise you’ll thank your future self :)

We’re looking forward to hearing about your next international adventure, and happy travels!