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(0)Once you’ve worked out your budget when travelling overseas, you have to figure out how you are going to access all your money.
Typically, there’s four types of things you can carry: cash, credit cards, debit (ATM) cards and travellers’ cheques. There are other things, such as Suncorp’s Cash Passport, but they are dependant on what financial institution you have an account with. Trying to balance factors such as safety, accessibility and maximisation of money after various exchange rate fees and commissions can be a headache. Often, it depends on where in the world you’re travelling which determines what the best mix of currency is.
Cash
Cash is very easy to convert at money changers which are readily available around tourist areas. It is perhaps more difficult to do it at banks – I was told at my local Commonwealth Bank that changing AUD to USD would involve a waiting period of a week or two to get the required currency in. Whether it’s better to convert to a foreign currency when you’re still in your home country, or after you arrive at your destination, requires a bit of research. Typically, the money changer market in Australia is less competitive than, say, Singapore where there is an Indian money changer around every corner. The more competitive the market, the better the cash exchange rates you will receive.
The exchange rate for any given day is called the spot rate. For our purposes, the interbank rate – the exchange rates banks use when swapping money between themselves – is the same as the spot rate. Money changers make profits by selling at a lower rate, and buying at a higher rate. The difference between the buy and sell rates is called the spread, and the larger the spread is, the higher the profit margin of the money changer.
For example, in Canada, money changers may buy your 1 USD for 1.19 CAD, and sell you 1 USD for 1.21 CAD. The spread here is 2 Canadian cents, around the spot rate of 1.20 CAD to the 1 USD. In other words, the spread is about 1.7%.
Currency spreads are not uniform. For example, in Canada the availability of American dollars is much greater than Australian dollars. Because Canadian money changers find it harder to swap Aussie dollars, they make their efforts worthwhile by increasing the spread.
So, 1 AUD may buy 0.87 CAD, but you may need 0.93 CAD to buy 1 AUD. This is a 6 Canadian cent spread (or a 6.7% spread).
In lesser developed countries, swapping anything other than US dollars may incur exorbitant spreads. Money changers in these countries may not have access to up to date information about exchange rates of non-US currencies and thus seek to insulate themselves from currency fluctuations.
In addition to buy/sell rates, some money changers charge commission. For example, after they convert your money, they will pocket a certain percentage for themselves as a “transaction fee”. Look for zero commission money changers, but note that these changers may roll this transaction fee into their spread anyway.
Further, some money changers (eg UOB in Thailand) will give higher rates for US bills with higher denominations. That is, swapping 50s and 100s will give you more Thai Baht than swapping the equivalent amount but in 10s and 20s.
Travellers’ Cheques
Travellers’ Cheques are best known for being secure and widely accepted. If you lose them, you can always replace them within 24 hours, unlike cash. This security comes with a cost, however, and it may be slightly inconvenient to have to produce your passport every time you want to encash your TCs.
TCs are normally bought at banks, or at a branch of Amex or Thomas Cook. When buying travellers’ cheques from a bank, it is sometimes possible to get the conversion done at an interbank rate. However, there will be a commission levied on this (which is essentially payment in exchange for the benefits TCs offer you). Some banks will waive this commission in certain circumstances – for example, being a Gold Mastercard holder at the Commonwealth Bank and being a member of one of their rewards programs allows the waiver of TC fees.
TCs are normally bought in USD, or sometimes Euros.
When you cash in US travellers’ cheques in America, you will normally get back all your money minus a commission of a few percent. So if you encash USD100, you may get back USD98 after a 2% commission. I presume this is because there is some work involved on the bank’s part in claiming back money from the TC vendor. There are some fee-free places where you can encash a TC without commissions – for example, Amex TCs can be encashed without commission at an Amex branch or a bank which is a “fee-free partner” of Amex (eg, Bank of America in the US).
When you encash TCs into another currency, you will receive a certain exchange rate which will be similar to (but rarely the same as) the exchange rate for cash. On top of this, there will be a commission charged (eg in Thailand, there’s government taxes and fees of 33 baht per transaction).
So, in a worst case scenario, you will get charged fees for buying TCs, for selling TCs, and only be able to recoup currency at a money changer’s spread rate.
In the best case scenario, you can buy TCs at the interbank rate and redeem 100% of your money if you are getting out money which is the same currency as the TC.
Debit Cards
Debit cards can be used overseas if they are part of the Maestro or Cirrus networks. Especially in developed countries, ATMs are widespread. However, they will be virtually useless for lesser developed countries or more remote towns which do not have ATMs.
The benefit of debit cards is that money withdrawn is normally debited from your bank account back at home at an interbank exchange rate. However, there is normally a flat fee incurred for withdrawing from an overseas ATM. For example, the Commonwealth Bank charges a flat fee of AUD$5 for each withdrawal from an overseas ATM.
Note that debit cards normally have a daily withdrawal limit. You can get this changed at your bank, but this is set in your home currency. So, if your limit is AUD 1000 per day, you will not be able to withdraw USD 1000 in one day while you’re in America.
If you are travelling with others, you can also save on the withdrawal fee by getting one person to withdraw money for the whole group (subject to daily withdrawal limits). For example, if there are two of you, only having to use the ATM once means you only need to pay a $2.50 withdrawal fee, which is often much more cost effective than using a money changer if you need several hundred Aussie dollars worth of currency. You can reimburse the person withdrawing back at home in your domestic currency, or you can rotate withdrawing duties if you are visiting more than one country.
Credit Cards
Like debit cards, credit card companies will bill you in your local currency after applying an interbank exchange rate. However, most credit cards (eg Mastercard) will charge a 1.5% international transaction fee which appears as a separate amount in your credit card statement. Amex tends to roll this fee into the same line. A 1.5% fee is roughly equivalent to a money changer’s spread of 3%.
Some shops will charge you a fee for using a credit card in order to pass on the merchant fee they incur from the bank. Typically, this is 2% for Mastercards and Visas, and 3% for Amex. This is much more prevalent in lesser developed countries where every cent counts, or for businesses with razor thin profit margins.
One advantage of using credit cards is you get frequent flier points. Normally points have a cash value of 50 to 70 cents per 100 points (0.5 to 0.7%), so this will marginally offset the international transaction fee.
Be careful with credit cards in lesser developed countries. Credit card fraud (via theft or “swiping”, where a copy of your card is made without your knowledge) may be a problem, so don’t let your card out of your sight. Most credit card companies offer a fraud protection guarantee, so this is more of an inconvenience than a major problem these days.
This is a quick and no-thought-required way I’ve always used to check whether a possessive apostrophe’s in the right place. A possessive apostrophe can always be expressed without the apostrophe by flipping the order of the words and inserting “of” between them. For example, “Schapelle’s cannabis” can be rephrased as “the cannabis of Schapelle”. You can do this with any phrase to isolate the subject of the phrase and thus where the apostrophe should go. Some examples:
Where should the apostrophe go in, “She gave him 20 weeks notice“?
Rephrase as: She gave him notice of 20 weeks.
Insert apostrophe: 20 weeks’ notice.Where should the apostrophe go in, “You could see the whites of the dogs eyes“?
This can be rephrased in two ways. Either, “You could see the whites of the eyes of the dog“, or, “You could see the whites of the eyes of the dogs“.
It becomes clearer which one is appropriate. If you’re about to be mauled by one dog, the former applies and the phrase should be “the dog’s eyes”. If you’re about to be mauled by a pack of dogs, the latter applies and the phrase should be “the dogs’ eyes”.Where should the apostrophe go in, “Bob was thrown out of the womens toilets“?
Rephrase as: Bob was thrown out of the toilets of the women.
Insert apostrophe: women’s toilets.
The only exception is when you’re using “its” in a possessive sense. No apostrophe is used. For example, “its stomach”.
(0)I got a call from someone yesterday telling me that I was one of 11 finalists in the SmartyHost Blog Awards, an Australian blogging competition offering a sizeable cash prize. As with all of these types of competition, it has had its fair share of controversy over selection criteria and judging issues, but that’s unavoidable given its format. Blogs are quite diverse and to compare a newslog with a special interest blog with a general purpose blog (otherwise known as an online diary) is to compare apples and oranges. It’s nonsensical. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for the exposure! I can’t say I’ve ever been linked by the SMH before.
(0)I used to be a uni bum, but now I’m just a bum. Having zero commitments is a very strange feeling. It actually comes with a bit of guilt and I have to keep reminding myself that this was the plan all along. Haven’t been working towards anything, just treading water, taking each week as it comes. I often have nothing planned for the next week, but by the weekend, the next week has filled up with stuff to do… catching up with friends, movies and a concert, indoor rock climbing, lan parties, getting some exercise in the gym, cooking, reading, catching up on TV episodes, casino scalping, etc… all the sort of stuff that tends to fall by the wayside when there are more things we like to regard as “important” to do. When you have all the time in the world, even the mundane things are pleasant – grocery runs, cleaning – because they’re not stuff you have to get out of the way so you can get on to the “important” stuff. It’s nice to be able to say “yes” to everything. I think it’s an experience everyone should try and not have to wait until retirement to try it. I start work in mid-February.
As you may have realised from the sidebar, I’m travelling around the world again soon. This time I’m with parents which explains my financial ability to go again. I’m with them up until Italy, then I’m splitting off to HK and KL which I’m looking forward to a lot. I think jet lag will be a real problem on this trip since it’s heading eastwards with a couple of 8 hour timezone jumps. There’s meant to be a largish family gathering in freezing-cold Vancouver though it’s with my dad’s sister-in-law’s side of the family so there’ll be lots of new faces. Though through the marvels of the net, I know one of them is a professional poker player which ought to be interesting. Someone also organised a Secret Santa list which will be interesting because I don’t even know the person I’m meant to be buying stuff for – no age, background, nothing except gender.
(0)It is a sad day. In a little over a week, my fantastic flatmate of five years is moving permanently back to the humid shores of Malaysia. Unfortunately, his funds have been seriously depleted after a budgeting mishap stemming from alcohol abuse last Friday. In an effort to rejuvenate these funds via high-risk high-return investing, a further, uh… mishap, at Star City has eliminated whatever vestige of hope he had of paying his bus fare to the airport next week.
Accordingly, he is having a firesale of his remaining assets on eBay with rock bottom starting prices. Check out the stationery grab bag – it’s a true bargain!
Bid now!
Nguyen Tuong Van is an Australian who will be hanged by Singaporean authorities on 2 December for trafficking almost 400 grams of heroin. It will be impossible for anyone in Australia to not have heard about his case, though a quick search on Google News reveals that media coverage outside this country is sparse. This is the latest in a series of Australians being caught overseas with drugs, but this is a wholly different story to the Shapelle Corby affair where what at question was the reliability of the Indonesian justice system.
In the past few weeks, desperate attempts have been made to save Nguyen’s life and the whole affair has become quite confusing in terms of what rationales people have been using to justify their respective opinions.
Most Australians believe that he doesn’t deserve to die for his crime, either because they think the death penalty has no place in a developed country, or that it is not a proportionate punishment to a crime such as drug trafficking (especially when Nguyen claims to only have trafficked in an attempt to bail his brother out from debt).
The result is the Australian public urging the Australian Government to do all it can to pressure Singapore into showing clemency and sparing Nguyen’s life. However, as Prime Minister Howard has pointed out, there is only so much diplomatic channels can do and it is unrealistic to expect the traditionally authoritarian Singaporean government to do an about-face now.
It is important that we should lobby as much as possible to save the life of this man who we do not believe should die for his crimes. However, it is wrong to resent or hold anger towards Singapore should our efforts fail and should the execution proceed. It is wrong to request trade sanctions be imposed upon Singapore, or to take recent events into consideration in the deal concerning Singapore Airline’s rights to fly the trans-Pacific route as Bruce Baird has said.
As they say, the law is the law and everyone entering Singapore knows – via the scary red words, written all in capitals, emblazoned on the immigration card saying “DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS” – the consequences of their actions. That was the law at the time when Nguyen was discovered at Changi Airport with enough heroin to make over 20,000 hits strapped to his back.
Despite the strictness of the Singaporean State, and various questionable legal instruments like the Internal Securities Act, academics have reported that Singapore has performed relatively well when it comes to adhering to the cornerstone concept of the Rule of Law. To all our appeals for clemency, Singapore has rightly said that if they were to go easy on Nguyen, that would breach that fundamental concept – why should Nguyen be treated differently from a local, or any other national? What would it say about their justice system then? After all, it’s not as though they enjoy sending people to the gallows, nor do it with haste and without due process. It is also a matter of respecting the laws of the country one visits. It is a pretty arrogant thing to expect foreign visitors to our country to follow our laws, but yet request that the same not happen for our citizens who travel abroad. We can all hope for clemency, but an illusory hope it is.
Of course, the major sticking point is that a “so-called civilised nation” like Singapore shouldn’t be using a death penalty in the first place. There is a great deal of literature in international jurisprudence which has more or less debunked the validity of using capital punishment. One of the most common views is that to take someone’s life is a brutal response and our society is “above that”. However, there are clearly more arguments to the point than this. First, there is the issue of the finality of killing someone in a system which is periodically prone to miscarriages of justice (for example in the US, a disturbing proportion of people on death row have subsequently been exonerated following the production of additional evidence, such as DNA evidence). Secondly, empirical studies have shown that the deterrent effect of capital punishment (especially in countries where executions are not carried out in public) is no more effective than a maximum punishment of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Thirdly, there is a theory called the brutalisation theory that states that executing criminals actually promotes violent crimes because:
First, potential killers are stimulated during the period following an execution … Secondly, the drama accompanying executions arguably incites some to seek notoriety. Finally, some people already predisposed toward violence seek this fate as a substitute to suicide … Data analyzing the number of homicides committed ten weeks before and ten weeks after an execution reveal a significant increase in the number of overall homicides.1
Fourthly, the argument that capital punishment in murder cases satisfies the requirement for proportionality in punishment is invalid because it is rare in our system to “seek an eye for an eye” – for instance, we do not “rape rapists, assault assailants, or burgle the home of burglars”.2 Fifthly, as a pragmatic matter, the cost of a case culminating in capital punishment is said to exceed that of one where life imprisonment is levied. Sixthly, there are worrying signs about how capital punishment is unevenly distributed in racial terms. In the US, jurors with anti-capital punishment views are routinely challenged (that is, removed from the jury panel). A black defendant is also more likely to be sentenced to death when the victim is white. Finally, it goes against the principle of everyone having a right to life.
Of course, few of the above reasons are directly applicable to the case at hand, but the imposition of a death penalty on a drug offence one that is “less” than murder seeks to strengthen the case against such a penalty. The body of legal research on the matter is hugely in favour of abolition of capital punishment.
The problem is, however, as much as capital punishment is regarded as an outmoded form of punishment, it is still a valid law in that it was passed validly in a democratic system (we’ll leave international law issues aside for the moment). Australians are within their rights to lobby for the abolition of the death penalty, though it is a stretch to hope that such an abolition, if implemented at all, will be implemented retrospectively by the Singapore legislature.
What’s troubling to me though is this: where was the outrage before an Australian face appeared before the gallows? Why do we not stand up for the “basic human rights” of all prisoners currently on death row in Singapore? They are not merely basic Australian rights, but basic human ones.
People complain that this latest incident is more evidence that Singapore is too strict and authoritarian – repressive, even. But why then is the media devoid of comments from readers about how the United States should also abolish the death penalty? After all, of all the nations to retain the death penalty, the US stands with some unfamiliar company – countries such as Russia, China, Japan, Nigeria, India, Indonesia and Pakistan – countries which are not known for their sterling human rights records (and neither is the US, in recent times). Granted, the US does not execute for drug offences – but remember, we are not talking about letting the punishment fit the crime here – we are talking about how the death penalty is a breach of fundamental human rights.
It will be interesting to see if the lobbying for clemency for death row prisoners continues if Nguyen is executed. To some, this may be shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but why should it matter to us if it is an Australian or a Singaporean staring at the hangman’s noose? If capital punishment goes against fundamental human rights, why should nationality be the basis for such strong efforts as displayed by the Australian people? No wonder the Singaporeans accuse us of having double standards.
One view that holds more weight might be arguing that capital punishment is a disproportionate punishment to levy on a drug offence. Especially concerning an offence in which the mandatory minimum sentence is to end the life of the convicted – just look at the Weldon Angelos case in the US, where a drug dealer was sentenced to 55 years in gaol for three counts of possession of a firearm (as a result, the judge imposed only one day of imprisonment for the multiple counts of drug-related offences). Mandatory minimums do not allow for the consideration of possible mitigating factors – such as, it is claimed, that he entered a plea of guilty immediately (though it is hard to see how he could plead otherwise, being caught red-handed with the stuff strapped to his back), that he co-operated with police, and that he was only doing it for his brother. However, again this falls foul of the same problems as above – the Singapore government is within its rights to levy such a punishment as distasteful as it is to us.
I think that the only avenue of appeal that has a reasonable amount of legal validity behind it – besides trying to pull on the heart strings of the Singaporean government and getting a pardon – is international law. However, this is difficult because a ruling by the International Court of Justice is only really binding if both parties voluntarily submit to its jurisdiction (just look at how the US refuses to recognise the International Criminal Court where its nationals are concerned). And even then, Singapore must be found to have breached some international treaty or customary international law by having a death penalty in order for the court to order favourably for Nguyen.
Nonetheless, a stay of execution would offer comfort of some kind if Singapore were to agree to have the ICJ hear the case. Strangely, a decision adverse to Singapore also offers it a valid reason to repeal its law without being able to be criticised for having double standards – though this is at the expense of having acknowledged it violated international law in the first place. Further, only States can utilise the ICJ and a decision by the Australian government to pursue this in The Hague is no doubt hampered by diplomatic considerations given the low probability of success.
Sadly, things do not look up for Nguyen. But one can only hope that, should he die, people will continue in their efforts to get governments around the world to abolish capital punishment as an unacceptable form of punishment in today’s international community.
1. John Truskett, “The Death Penalty, International Law and Human Rights” (2004) 11 Tulsa Journal of Comparative and International Law 557, 588.
2. Claire Finkelstein, “An A Priori Argument Against the Death Penalty” (2002) 32.
I walked into a store called MapWorld on Pitt St. I’m a bit of a map geek (through osmosis, I have an unhealthy knowledge of world capitals) so I found it really cool. They have some really big world maps you can buy there and they sell some of them laminated, although the lamination often costs more than the map itself. They also have a wide, but overpriced, collection of travel books, atlases and globes. There’s a good quality large map going there for about $100 which would fit my wall very nicely!
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5:34pm (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 