Before we left for the trip I talked to a couple of bankers about how to best handle a bank account for foreign travel. One banker who lived in Brazil for a while with the military said to only use a card and do not open an account in a foreign country. The foreign country part I heard in Argentina from former US citizens doing business down there. There are typically pretty large fees associated with ATM withdrawals and unless you can find some branch of a US bank they will typically only let you withdraw about $150 to $200 if you are lucky. A Citi bank in Bogota once let us take out about $400.
But you say - why would you carry around that much cash and not just use a card instead? Well unless you are just going to real touristy areas in South America you will be paying for allot of things in cash. Many of the hotels and hostels that are good deals will take only cash. Generally outfits of any sort that are set up to take Visa are charging first world prices for things. It is very common in smaller towns in Chile, Argentina and Colombia that no one in the whole town takes a credit card and there is no ATM.
Also you may want to consider taking one Visa card and one MasterCard as not all places are set up to take both. This would also be a good idea in case you loose one or have one stolen. It is not uncommon to read blogs with disturbing stories of people being held up and being forced to go from ATM to ATM to withdraw money. Thankfully nothing even close to that has happened in the four months down here but here is some possible advice. You may want to have one card with small balances or small daily limits. Also you may want to have one dummy card for an old non functional account.
One blog that Laurie read said that you should carry a throw down wallet with a little cash in it. If someone is trying to rob you, you through it down and run. They will be preoccupied with that. This seems like good advice and if you had a dummy card in there they might think they really scored.
And in case you think you need to be ultra worried about the secret location you keep your cash, well we frequently would see people pull out huge wads of bills in congested streets in Bogota and elsewhere in Columbia and not even look around to see if there were any "security risks" in the area.
One guy from Brooklyn, New York we ran into in Bogota who was marrying a Colombian woman had this to say about safety. Being abducted would be really far fetched. If you get robbed you give them your money and move on with your life. It is not the end of the world. I say if you had to give some robber a hundred in cash you had on you, pretend you just spent a few hours at a casino. I am sure any American worth his or her salt can think of plenty of ways to blow a hundred dollars without having to think too hard.
Here is another way of looking at it. During the several months that we were traveling we either lost or damaged about a thousand dollars worth of gear. (electronics like cameras, a translator and kindle made up a big portion of that) If we would have been robbed of those items or that much money we would have felt very violated and probably never returned to South America especially if it happened more than once - victimized repeatedly - what an outrage that would have been!
