Money! or, using credit and ATM cards

Travel is not just oohing and aahing at the sights of interest and gorging yourself on the local cuisine, it's spending money.

As some of you know, I'm always looking for the best credit and ATM cards, the ones with the best rewards and lowest fees. Now you can benefit from my years of research and investigation!

Our main credit card now, both for domestic U.S. use and international travel, is the Charles Schwab Signature VISA. This card gives a 2% rebate on all purchases and never charges a foreign transaction fee. Never! (Most U.S. cards nowadays charge up to 3% every time you use them outside the country.)

Most places here in Buenos Aires gladly accept credit cards. We use the VISA all the time at supermarkets and restaurants. The few times we've seen "en efectivo" (in cash) it's been for the menu del día at a restaurant, the shortened list of daily lunch specials.

To get cash, we've settled on Charles Schwab Bank's VISA ATM card. Again, no foreign transaction fees and they will rebate any ATM fee from anywhere in the world.

In the past, Argentine ATMs worked like those in Western Europe: fees were charged by the bank where you had an account, not by the bank that operated the machine. Thus, if you were from outside the country you didn't pay a fee to use the ATM.

A few months ago the Argentine banks switched to a U.S.-style system and began charging a flat ATM fee of about $3 US for every withdrawal from a foreign bank. To make matters worse, they code the fee oddly on their electronic data records so that it does not appear as an ATM fee to a U.S. bank. Charles Schwab figured it out, however, and has refunded our ATM fees.

To make things even better, both Schwab cards give very favorable exchange rates, only 10 or 20 basis points off the posted rate in currency markets.

P.S. Another credit card that has been useful to us has been the Citi AAdvantage MasterCard. We'd never use it here in Argentina (there's a 3% foreign transaction fee) but we do 'churn' them: apply for a new card, spend some minimum amount, get 25,000 or 30,000 AA frequent flier miles as a sign-up bonus, cancel the card, then apply for a new card. Since we do this a couple times a year, we've never had to pay for airline tickets to Buenos Aires, using frequent flier miles instead. Round trip tickets on AA from DFW to EZE are generally $1,000 and up, so paying about $50 for taxes and fees for a ticket is quite a good deal.