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by Incassable » Fri, 06 Jul 2007 5:46 am
Researcher,
I will add my two cents regarding U.S. credit card usage in Singapore (or any country outside the U.S. for that matter). If you use either a U.S. issued Visa and Mastercard outside of the U.S., they will tack an additional 3% onto the purchase and call it a 'foreign purchase charge.'
So, make the assumption you do buy something in Singapore using a credit card, you will end up paying 3% of the cost to Visa/Mastercard. Additionally, as everyone else has mentioned, regardless of which method you use, you will have to pay fees to move money from Singapore to the U.S. Based on a transfer of around $5000, my experience is that the total fees to transfer this money will be ~3%.
So you will end up paying an additional 3% on top of the 3% foreign purchase charge to move your money that you made in Singapore to the U.S. so you can pay off your credit card company for the purchase.
In total, you would end up paying an additionl fee of approximately 6% of the item's value to simply use your U.S. based credit card to pay for something in Singapore (or any foreign country). On a purchase of $100, you will pay $103 to the U.S. credit card company for buying that item. Basing it on transferring about $5000 back the U.S., you will again have to pay an additional 3% to move the money back to the U.S. which means your actual cost for a $100 item is around ~$106-all the while you could have paid for it using the money you made in Singapore and the cost would have been a straight $100.
Moral; try to avoid using the U.S. based credit card in Singapore (and outside the U.S. in general) if at all possible. Use the money that you make in Singapore to pay for your expenses and only shift money back to the U.S. that you want to save/invest or that you need to shift in order to pay for U.S. bills.
As LT mentioned, to minimize the impact of fixed fees, you want to tranfer as large amount as possible rather than several smaller transfers.
Kindof as a side note; if your income is over $82,400 per year, there are also some potential tax advantages to transferring only what you have to back to any U.S. based financial institution.
Regarding how you actually transfer your money; I can't speak in terms specifically in regards to doing it from Singapore, but I have done it from a lot of other countries and in general, the TT is much more economical when moving anything more than a few hundred dollars.
My experience is that the other methods are filled with more headaches, surprises and in the end seem to be less efficient than TT. Just for an example; one time it took about 4 months to get an international check issued from HSBC in Mexico to post on my Bank of America account in the U.S. AND after four months, BOA found a reason to charge me $400 to deposit the check which was only for about $7000!!! I did argue the charge and got most of it refunded, but still, when you are 12 hours in front of the U.S., you want to avoid putting yourself in a position where you are contesting ANYTHING over the phone.
Good luck,
cd
