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Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Committing Financial Harakiri and the ICBC Travel Mastercard

I will be going overseas to splurge on luxury watches (looking for Pateks and Audemars Piguet) hence committing financial harakiri. Sweat.... Actually, its a gift to people special so damn it, better make it bang for the buck. Save on the taxes. I can't possibly be carrying more than ten thousands of cash overseas. Fortunately, a special shoutout to a forumner called BBCwatcher who alerted the public on the ICBC Travel Mastercard. No link nor picture, as i am not advertising for them nor paid by them.

My motive of this post is for constructive feedback in case i did my calculations improperly or for any alerts if there is a better card out there for overseas foreign transaction because every cent counts.

The ICBC Travel Mastercard has a bank fee of 2.5% and an unlimited cashback of 3% on foreign transactions.

I used the following 2 websites.
1) The official Mastercard website that lists the indicative forex rates. We can input the bank fee which i inputted as 2.5%.
2) A money exchange website that lists the exchange rates that one can find in Singapore ( i am not being paid so no link).
Official Mastercard Website
Money exchange website
Nett cashbacks for transactions in stated currencies after bank fees 
(done on 25/10/2018 11.10am)
YEN = 0.41%
USD = 0.53%
AUD = 0.22%
MYR = 0.43%
NZD = 0.74%
EUR = 0.46%
KRW = 1.4%

The KRW and NZD are aberrations. I will need to observe them again as what Mastercard does is to convert foreign currencies to USD before converting to SGD. Since all foreign currencies have to be converted to USD first before being converted to SGD, it is unlikely that the nett cashback on any foreign currency to be higher than the nett cashback on USD. Perhaps the money exchange website isn't showing correctly for these rates. 

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