Cash withdrawals by Credit Card

[Mjc]

I believe that this subject has been raised before, but if not, the following may help.
For various historic reasons, my wife and I now have a number of debit and credit cards issued in the UK (we have just been remiss in not cancelling the unwanted ones). However, we recently carried out an experiment by drawing the same amount of euros from French cash points on the same day, to see which gave us the best exchange rate. To our surprise, our Nationwide B.S. Visa DEBIT card gave us 1.585, and was far and away the best, whilst the worst were Nat West Master card and Royal Bank of Scotland Maestro/Cirrus card, which gave us 1.51 approx. Since the latter two also charge 1.5% cash handling fee, whilst Nationwide Visa is "free", the difference is greater.
So we then used the Nationwide and Mastercard each to buy an identically priced item, and found, once again, that the exchange rates were broadly similar as for cash withdrawals.
Obviously, there is potentially a slight loss of interest by using a debit card, but for the amounts in question, the difference is negligable.
I wonder if anyone else has found one type of card to be preferable to others for both cash withdrawals and purchases.

[Mazan]

> To our surprise,
>our Nationwide B.S. Visa DEBIT
>card gave us 1.585, and
>was far and away the
>best,

AFAIK the Nationwide, along with just one or two other card providers, adds no weighting to the rate applied by Visa. Other banks add between 1 and 2.75%, on top of any cash withdrawal charge.

[roger taylor]

I have long sung the praises of the Nationwide BS and their debit and credit cards. I always use the credit card for purchases and the debit card for hole in wall. They came out top in the Daily Mail Money pages a few years ago and remain top.

Roger