[SOLVED] Re: How to I record a Credit Card purchase in foreign curr bill?

whwtan whwtan at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 15 07:01:00 EDT 2013


On 14/4/2013 3:25 AM, Anonymous wrote:
>> I have been using something like this myself but I somehow managed to
>> convince myself I was doing something "wrong" since I wasn't
>> capturing my real cost during time of purchase.
> You can do better if you want to concretely separate the real cost
> from the forex cost.  Banks have a fuzzy, non-transparent way of
> computing the exchange rate.  The percentage that they charge is never
> a spot market rate.  E.g. if the banks ToS states they will nick 2%,
> the /real/ forex cost will vary from 1.5% to 2.5%, roughly, because
> the wholesale rate that the bank itself pays is based on a daily
> average -- never the realtime spot rate at the moment of the purchase.
> In fact, the bank does not even know when transaction occurs.. only
> when it's processed, so the bank could not be precise even if they
> were motivated to.
>
> So, to be precise, look at the timestamp on the receipt, and then get
> the historic mid-market spot rate from that moment in time.  This data
> is hard to find, but I'll mention a free source if you're interested.
>
> Then when you get the bank statement, the actual charge will obviously
> vary.  That difference is a foreign exchange cost.  You can adjust a
> split transaction, or you can keep it simple and make a separate
> transaction to capture the forex difference.

There are very rarely some vendors who display the cost in my actual 
currency, you need to "accept" the cost before the payment proceeds. 
It's really nice and I love it.
But I've only come across those sorta purchases so rarely I'd rather not 
count on it.
> BTW, did you tag the thread as "[SOLVED]" to discourage further
> replies?
Not at all. I was just trying to help out the list by letting everyone 
know that I was given an answer which has been satisfactory so anyone 
could just jump straight to that post from the header.
[Particularly useful if a thread starts getting 20-30 over replies.]

This is actually also to keep some heat off some of the best people here 
on the list. They can skip my post knowing that someone has helped me. 
[I've seen that they answer a huge number of the posts...INCREDIBLE]

In short, I use the tag [SOLVED] to say "Thanks for helping me! My 
problem has been resolved and if you wish to jump straight to the 
conclusion it's here."


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