Date: Sep 12, 2022

When you travel, you want to have these debit cards with you. Either Revolut or YouTrip.

These are the MasterCard Debit card (Either Revolut or YouTrip) that allows you to pay money in foreign currencies and the card only charge you the BEST foreign exchange rates chose to the Yahoo! Currency Exchange rate. 🙂

For example, for my recent Bangkok trip.

You know la, all the BANKS try to make the most money out of you. So, the Thailand bank wanted you to charge your credit cards/debit cards in their Thai Baht currency (so that they can use their HIGH bank exchange rate to exchange the Singapore dollars to Thai Baht). And the Singapore bank always remind you to charge the card in SGD dollars (so that the local bank will use their HIGH bank exchange rate to charge you the amount of Thai Baht you used in Bangkok).

Only either Revolut or YouTrip will give you the BEST RATE compared to your local banks or etc.

Let me do a simple experiment. After you see this, you know what to do. What we are doing is to use DBS ATM card, Revolut & YouTrip card to withdraw 10,000Baht from the SAME ATM machine in Bangkok.

The Thai Bank will always charge you an admin fee, in our SCB case, they charged 220 baht for each withdrawel.

Next, please make sure you say NO to the offer conversion to your home currency (SGD) for your convenience. Because the Thai bank will charge even higher and higher exchange rate.

Then, you use Revolut to withdraw 10,000 Baht. It is actually 10,220 Baht in total.

Go to the app, you will see IMMEDIATELY, Revolut will deduct S$415.92 from your Revolut account.

Next, you do the same thing. Withdraw 10,000 Baht from the same ATM using YouTrip card.

And guess what? Your transactions is only S$405.03

Next, take out your DBS ATM card. Yes, the card that you use to withdraw the money from ATM machine in Singapore. And Guess what? The DBS will deduct S$432.02 from your DBS account. Wow.

So, I think a simple comparison will tell you the result. If you withdraw money using your DBS, you can save almost S$35 for a 10,220Baht withdrawal. (S$405.03 vs. S$439.02). Revolut is not far behind. That is I think because I withdraw the money on a Sunday. So Revolut will charge an extra 1% on weekends (so I heard).

Here is my simple advise.

1. Apply either Revolut or YouTrip or some other equavalent debit cards. Use it on withdrawing money from foreign ATM machine or use it as credit card. It will save you a ton of money. I think don’t need to use your SGD credit cards, as you will end up letting the bank earn so much money on the exchange rate difference.
2. The is some restriction on Revolut or YouTrip like, there is a max amount of money you can transfer to the debit cards. (set by MAS Singapore). But the savings you get is worth it. When you transfer money to the Revolut or YouTrip card, please read the extra %%% they charge for using credit card method, Paypal method, PawNow method, etc etc. Understanding those will save you even more. And you can recharge the card from overseas too.
3. Although Revolut rates is higher a bit, but still save quite significantly. And they have some quite neat features. Once you transfer the money into Revolut there is a bank transfer method for you to take out the money. I think YouTrip cannot do so. I also heard that YouTrip is not available on Pay Wave on your Apple Watch or Apple Pay. But Revolut is available. Lastly, some YouTrip users say some ATM facilities in oversea refuse to let you withdraw money.