Dec 10

Dec 10 How much money our Credit & Debit card saved us

On this post we are going to cover how much money we saved with what was in our wallet. Earlier in the year we wrote a blog post about what was in our wallet. We cover each card in detail there, like annual fees, benefits and such. Definitely check out our “Money matters” blog post for those details. As always, if you wanna hear us chattin’ it up, scroll to the bottom to watch our YouTube video.

Onto the good stuff! We didn’t carry much in our wallet, this was it:

Visa Chase Sapphire Reserve
Local ID, we carried our driver’s license when we didn’t want to carry our passport with us.
Charles Schwab ATM card
We also had an RFID wallet & sleeves - again, checkout the “Money matters” blog post for more details.

So, how much did you save?

Charles Schwab ATM card

Over a 2 year period, Charles Schwab refunded us a little over US $500 in ATM fees. This is how much we would have spent if we had to pay the ATM fees most banks charge. Also, the Schwab exchange rate was always market value. In some places you can probably get better value than this, but you have to hunt it down. For us, we were able to withdraw in places like the airport, notorious for having really terrible exchange rates for tourists, with a worry in the world. That’s pretty awesome! and if you are wondering, no, this blog post not sponsored.

Chase Sapphire Reserve Visa

For the same time period, 2 years, we accumulated 195,000 Chase points. Chase values these points at about US $2,400. Some people can transfer the points to airline miles and get better value but if you cash this through the Chase portal, then $2,400 is all you get. Still, quite a bit of savings that we mostly used in hotels and flights.

The Chase card also comes with a Priority Pass. This pass allows you access to over 1300 lounges, in over 600 cities across 148 countries. Priority pass values each visit at US $27/person. We visited 61 lounges so our savings looked like this: 61 lounges x US $27 x 2 adults = US $3,294 - let’s just say US $3,300 to keep the numbers easier.

All in all, the Chase card saved us US $2,400 + US $3,300 = US $5,700.

Like with our Schwab debit card, the Chase card has no foreign transaction fee (this means they don’t charge you to convert from a currency to US Dollars) and the exchange rate they apply is the market rate. This may sound so ‘evident’ but there was a time when using credit cards abroad was not as convenient as it is today, not just because they weren’t readily accepted, but also because each transaction had additional fees that made using the card more expensive. So, thank you Chase for keeping things simple. And no, this is not a sponsored post, we just really appreciated this card.

So, with just these 2 cards and a little of planning ahead, we saved US $6,200!!! Wow! Yea, we were pretty shocked too.

Here’s an infographic we hope you like: