For some years now I’ve been harping on about how great Nationwide are as the only UK bank with a debit card you can use abroad for no fees. Likewise, their credit card is one of only three (along with Abbey National and the Post Office) with the same no-fee deal. I even changed my regular current account to them to take advantage of these.
But – you guessed it – no more. From 6 May for its credit card, and 1 June on the debit card, you’ll pay an added 0.84% on spending outside Europe, jumping to 1% in July. Their wording is that they themselves are not adding a fee. They’re simply no longer going to “absorb” the fees that Visa charge to the bank. It’s still – I believe – less than virtually every other bank’s existing charges.
I got the first warning of this from the excellent Money Saving Expert site, though full details can be found (if you dig…) here at Nationwide.
So, without doing a huge amount of research it seems that changing the credit card could be worthwhile but that the debit card (for ATM withdrawals) is still a better deal than any other.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=840)
The current economy is a mess everybody knows it. What is amazing is how some people continue their daily life as if nothing changed and one such behavior is their attitude to credit cards. The first step Americans need to do is get rid of their credit card debt as it is the best symbol for how Americans lived above their means for so many years getting all of us to this big economy mess. First step is education. Here is a good resource to read about credit cards http://www.creditcardknowhow.info start with understanding and then please stop loading your cards with too many charges.
I’ll confess I thought this comment was spam – maybe it is – but the page it links to is actually pretty interesting and doesn’t seem to have any obvious ads so I’ve let it through.