Cash

There is “money” and there is “cash.” These are different. “Money” means what financial assets you have in various accounts. “Cash” means what currencies you have in your wallet or safe to buy things on a given day.

We’ve discovered that cash management is an important task on a world cruise. For each country that you visit, you have to decide how much cash you are going to convert into the local currency, and how you are going to convert it.

On the ship, the conversion rates are poor. It is not unusual for them to have a 20% spread between their bid and ask price…and they charge an additional $3.95 fee for the transaction. On shore, you find spreads closer to 2-5%, so you do not have to worry about converting too much.

But, you have to maintain an adequate pool of US cash. We brought $800 in cash. In hindsight, this was not enough. If I had it to do over, I’d bring $2,000.

Originally, Princess said that they’d cash personal checks. Once we were onboard, they said they would not. However, one passenger said they did it for her. I haggled for 3 weeks with them, then they admitted that if I let them photocopy a check, their head office would approve it. But, they wanted to call my bank to get them to confirm info on my account. Of course, my bank would not give out this info, so this approach did not work.

The ship’s casino will give cash that they charge to your ship’s account, but they charge a 3% fee on this. I tried to get around this by using ATM machines. In Cambodia, the ATM gave US dollars, so I thought that was a great approach. However, I now see that the local fee plus my bank’s fee was greater in total than the 3% I would have paid at the ship’s casino.

Net bring a lot of cash or travelers checks…or just decide that a 3% fee is okay.

Another dimension is small US bills. We brought $200 in one dollar bills. This is important in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia where they’ll take dollars, but you want to avoid using big bills because you then get change in local currency. Not only can’t you easily convert that back, but it could well be counterfeit.