FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Comprehensive list of ATM fees by country?
Old Jun 16, 2012 | 12:35 pm
  #10  
Happy
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Originally Posted by sdsearch
But with a cash advance on a credit card, don't you start getting charged the cash advance interest rate on the amount you withdrew itself, from the moment you make the withdrawael, with no grace period (like you have for purchases), and if so don't you have to factor that in? The cash advance interest rate, even if onlyfor a few days (say, you pay the card balance off as soon as you get to someplace you can do that online, it still takes a few days to show up as paid) will be way way more than any C/A fee or foreign transcation fee would have been.

So I don't even see the point of worrying that much about whether credit card cash advances have a slight fee or not, because IMHO that's fairly irrelevant compared to the bigger cost of the instant cash advance interest rate that's applied to them.

(And I'm not sure you can extrapolate from fees or no fees on a credit cash advance at a particular ATM to whether or not you would have had any fees on a compeltely different bank account debit card at the same ATM. The same ATM can do completely different things fee-wise for a credit cash advance than for a debit withdrawal, and of course at your end the fees vary from card to card and account to account.)
He is doing it for emergency needs. As long as he immediately pays it back while hopefully he does not have prior charges made on the card before the cash withdrawal and NOT to have any after - paying off the ENTIRE balance (incl both the cash withdrawal AND the purchases) shortly after he made the C/A, the expenses would be bearable in absolute $ terms.

The cash advance fee would always be charged but the ATM withdrawal would have a much lower forex conversion differential than going to a bank.

Of course one should try to avoid using a credit card's C/A feature by all means. But when one has no other options, the CC can be useful provided you even know the PIN of the card for C/A. (I know I dont.)

Last edited by Happy; Jun 16, 2012 at 12:56 pm
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