I must have the most expensive give you nothing credit card on the planet (Mastercard Diamond CBA) it costs me $249 per year to have and it gives me points I never use, insurance I never seem to be able to use and charges 3% on foreign transactions. Why haven’t I changed it? Well, it is a pain in the proverbial to set bank accounts and cards up these days and I just haven’t got around to it.
On the weekend I made a momentous move and gripped my teeth spending Sunday setting up some better money handling facilities. What did I get ?
- HSBC global account
This is a debit account that allows you to store money in several currencies. Handy to play the currency game especially these days with the southern plunge that the Aussie dollar is taking. - HSBC Visa platinum credit card
no annual fees if you spend more than $6000 and two free business lounge passes. - BankWest Zero Mastercard
no annual fees, no foreign transaction fees – I save 3% on my current card on that one !
Notes:
1) I have just come back from my trip to Canada (August 2019). HSBC stopped transactions on many occasions especially when moving from Canada to USA and back. It was driving me nuts, despite me informing them of my travel intentions. Luckily I still had my CBA mastercard. The Visa Debit (global account) is useless for hiring cars, to protect yourself here have a low limit credit card and cancel it if things go awry – that is you are victim and not the offender.
2) BankWest were slow on approving my credit card so I cannot report on how well I went on its use. (20 days versus 3 for HSBC).
3) Hold on to that mobile phone. Banks these days make confirmations via the mobile phone. Change the SIM for a local provider they treat it as a suspicious move. I have a dual SIM phone but failed to place the Australian SIM in the second slot so no confirmations were received. I did not have a SIM extracting pin, nor was I in the city to get one so I could not remedy the issue other than by long expensive discussion over the phone.
I would have liked to use a Forex account to save further but it has limited use and risky as you need to transfer to the vendor’s bank account. (trust relationship, at least credit cards can be disputed).
I did my research using https://www.finder.com.au/credit-cards/best-credit-cards and https://www.creditcard.com.au .