Cashback on overseas purchases?

newsmonkey

I spend a large percentage of each year in France, and have both British and French bank accounts.

Reading the article on best cards for overseas purchases, I'm considering using the Nationwide credit card to spend in France the portion of my income that is earned in sterling (paid into UK account), rather than transferring cash or withdrawing it at a machine.

Is there such a thing is a UK credit card that pays cashback (in the region of 1% if poss) on overseas purchases? Would the benefits of this be outweighed by things like loading fees?

Egg (France) have a cashback credit card paying 1%, with an annual fee (that's normal over here) of 35€. So you'd have to spend 3500€ to recoup the original cost.

Can anyone suggest any better?

newfoundglory

newsmonkey wrote:

Is there such a thing is a UK credit card that pays cashback (in the region of 1% if poss) on overseas purchases? Would the benefits of this be outweighed by things like loading fees?

There are cashback cards at 1%, but yes, the benefits of cashback ARE indeed outweighed by foreign loading fees. If cashback was 1%, and the foreign loading was 2.5% to 2.57% then clearly the fees are nearly three times the amount of cashback.

As far as i know there is no card which offers both cashback and no charges for overseas purchases... Nationwide did up until the beginning of this month... but the wholesale conversion rate on the nationwide card are so good you can hardly complain at not getting any cashback!

I suppose whether you get a french card depends on, for example, what the visa wholesale exchange rate is for the pound/euro... it might be better to have a UK card without loading fees... or it might not... you'd have to work that part out yourself!

You are going to clearly get more euros for your £'s by using a nationwide card to spend, than if you got a bank to transfer money from the UK to France because I don't think any bank could better the visa exchange rates.