Filed my tax returns yesterday. Taxes in the US is a topic that deserves several posts, but that'll have to wait.
So I did bring some cash with my on my latest trip to Europe. This is what $10,000 in cash looks like:
The stack in the back is five bunches of 50 twenty-dollar bills each. The one in the front has as many fifties and hundreds I could get my hands on without getting weird looks. Oh, what the heck! Here they are from another angle:
This is the largest amount of cash you can bring with you out of the US without having to report it by filling out a form. A wee bit bulky for my taste!
It turned out to be quite convenient to have some dollar bills with us on travel. I also brought some traveler checks, but they are apparently rarely used in Europe anymore and have worse exchange rate than cash. Won't use them again. I paid around a 3% fee to exchange US dollars cash into European money, the same fee as when I pay with my credit card, but without the risk of fraudulent charges starting to appear a couple of months later.
We also made an excursion to a middle-eastern country. Unlike in the US, they prefer large-denomination US bills! For the local merchants, 15 hundreds were worth 76 twenties (not 75)! Not an enormous difference, roughly 1.3%, but I was pretty surprised. Euros would have worked in some places, but are still much less prevalent than the greenback.
So I'd definitely recommend bringing a small stack of US $100 bills when traveling to remote places, too bad they're so hard to get! Since last post, I cashed an 1100-dollar check at my bank and asked for hundreds. They again told me it's not safe for me to carry that much cash (yes, Mom). They also handed me a stupid leaflet and told me it was mandatory when a customer cashed a 1000-dollar check or larger. It was about check fraud, where someone mails you a check, tells you to cash it and wire some of the money back to them. As if fraud never happens with electronic payments!
I'm actually expecting things to get worse. I dread a future with only electronic money, easy to track by governments. I do value what little privacy we still have left.
