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Best Ways to Carry Cash When Traveling
As important as cash is when traveling overseas, it’s also important to carry cash securely. There are a number of ways to do this. When you buy currency online, you’ve saved on unforeseen costs and transaction fees, so you want to keep safety measures in play when traveling oversea. Carrying cash is the ultimate balancing act as you want to both deter thieves and also make it easy to access your money when you need to pay for something. Below are some secure ways to carry cash when traveling:
Divide and Conquer
By keeping your cash in different places, should you fall victim to a thief, you have back up cash to continue your travels. By keeping some money on your person, some in your bag, and the remainder in your hotel’s safety deposit box, you won’t find yourself without cash and will always have a safe place to store your monies.
Don’t Advertise
Although on-body storage is a great place to store cash, you need to be careful as you don’t want to advertise where your additional cash may be stored. This is particularly important if you’re in a place where you can’t store your cash in a safety-deposit box and your only recourse is on-body storage. Above all, avoid a fanny pack as it marks you as a tourist. Those large, easy zipper pockets that are easy for you to access are just as easy to access for a potential thief.
Small bills vs. large bills
It’s often a good idea to keep small bills handy so you don’t advertise how much cash you really have on you. It’s better to have small bills to buy small items such as souvenirs rather than using a large bill for a small item. When you pack your bags, make sure you’ve got a mix of small bills and coins for smaller purchases such as food, souvenirs, and entry fees. Save the larger bills for larger purchases and keep them in a secure part of your wallet or bag.
About your Wallet
Trim your wallet by only keeping the essentials for travel; one credit or debit card and cash. Clear out the loyalty cards and the like which will help you not only travel lighter, but if the unthinkable happens and it gets stolen, there’s less to replace. A dummy wallet is an excellent deterrent as you can use sample credit cards you get in the mail and the smallest bills leaving the least to lose if it gets stolen or lost. It might also be a good idea to keep two wallets. The travel wallet is bared down to the bare necessities of cash and maybe one credit card snug in unused pockets rather than stretched out pockets from too many gym membership or loyalty program cards.
Other ways to carry cash while traveling are to use alternative forms of cash such as the Oyster Card when traveling the London metro. Of course, the best way is to adapt to the local culture by having a variety of bills and coins as wells as credit cards, if need be and being aware that in some countries U.S. dollars are both an official and unofficial currency.