Fun with foreign exchange

Nothing special going on. We're just hanging out in Greenwich, Nova Scotia waiting for our daughter to arrive. She's driving here from Ottawa today. It's a long (15 hours) drive to do in one day, but she's coming with a friend of hers, so they are sharing the driving.

Yesterday we drove to the nearby town of Berwick with granddaughter Sadie. Grandson Cameron went to visit with his other grandfather for the night. 

That's okay though... it's a lot more peaceful when they are not together!

Sadie is such a character.

Grandpa took her to the playground.

She is pretty easy to keep entertained.

The "tap" function on my credit card stopped working and I had ordered a new one to be shipped to the local bank branch here. We were driving by anyhow so I stopped in to see if it had arrived, but it hadn't. While there, I picked up some $USD cash. We had borrowed $120 USD from our friends Glen and Steve back in January when we had to pay for our Turkiye visas and we'll be seeing them next month so that we can pay them back.

Anyhow, I asked for $120 USD in cash, and the girl told me that she had to debit my account $160 CAD. Just for fun, I asked her what the foreign exchange markup was. 

She didn't have a clue. 

I already knew the answer, but I was just having a bit of fun. Most people don't understand foreign exchange, apparently even some people who work in banks. She looked a little confused, then blamed it on the fact that she was still in training. Okay, I can accept that. She asked the supervisor, however I overheard the conversation and we couldn't get a straight answer out of her either.

I was being charged $160 and change, but using the real live exchange rate it would have come to $156. The bank is pocketing $4 and change  (about 2.5%) for processing the transaction. The thing that's not right is that they hide the fee in an inflated foreign exchange rate. 

There's a big movement afoot in Europe regarding these types of hidden fees. Banks should be more transparent about what they are charging people. 

That's why I use Wise to process our foreign exchange transaction. We get paid in $USD for a variety of things, and I figured out that we were paying out almost $90 CAD a month in hidden foreign exchange fees to our Canadian bank. When I switched to Wise a few years ago to process those transactions, we saved ourselves about $1,000 CAD per year!

Anyhow, I explained the transaction to both the teller and her supervisor. They both learned something today!

Later in the day, Ruth and I went for a 5 km (3 mile) powerwalk. There are lots of nice walking trails in this area, many of them accessible right from the house.

Out for a walk.

Uh oh. There are some storm clouds moving in!

We made it home 20 minutes before the rain started.

Waiting patiently to see our daughter, She should be here about 9pm tonight!

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Nice price drop on a variety of Apple SE Watches.

And in Canada...

Intex Challenger K1 Kayak.