Hacker News Reader

Comment by verticalscaler | Hacker News Reader

“To give you have an idea, within the first 2 days in Argentina, I dealt with over five different rates. A restaurant actually offered me the proper blue rate (1100) to pay for the bill, whereas one cueva (informal exchange house) offered me 1050 and another 1070. The kiosk where I bought a SIM card from had it at 1060, and Uber, who did the currency conversion themselves rather than leaving it up to my credit card, did it at 1000.”

Ah, no. You do the cambio in downtown Buenos Aires once for the whole trip. Random restaurants offering you different rates or inflating your bill is simply people trying to take advantage of a foreigner.

View on HN

There's that thing about the largest bill being 2000 pesos atm, and even that being rare.

You might need a bag to carry cash for the whole trip, and it will attract the wrong kind of attention?

This is very accurate. Normally western union will give you notes of 1000 pesos, which is just about manageable in pockets if you're getting a few hundred dollars.

I had one instance where there was only one western union I could use (because of the weekend) and they only had 100 and 200 peso notes. I walked out with 300 dollars worth of notes in a black bin bag and hurriedly tried to find a taxi before anyone noticed...

Actually we found we got better rates elsewhere (El Chaltén hotels for example would exchange at the daily blue rate from DolarYa) plus the random restaurants were the ones usually offering the legit rate. Unlike the cueva, they actually don't have leverage, and would love to get their hands on some dollars.

We never exchanged money like this, but were happy to pay the bill in dollars at the end (prices were never set in dollars). And the math checked out completely.

Note we also came with a similar-ish mentality. Let's exchange early on and be set. But this misses out a key point (that hopefully will become less relevant). The currency devalues fast. Exchange early on and you might find yourself holding a lot less than you got.

We spent a month in Argentina, and had we done this, we'd have taken a 9% hit just on devaluation.

I’m with ya if you’re going to stay for a prolonged duration or exchange significant sums.

A month for me was <$500 so the hassle was not be worth it (time, risk) but ymmv of course.

There’s also FB groups for expats to get a slightly better rate from shifty brits.

What's wrong with that? In my country you'll get all the kinds of rates when trying to exchange your dollars. They'll probably be within few % of each other, but that's the market. Every exchange and every bank sets their own rates.

I guess some US cards also charge a lot for foreign transactions? I always paid in pesos on card, and in fact I don't think anyone ever even tried to charge me in dollars.

Also, with Uber, you're not likely to get many rides if you pay by card.

I am told as of last year, if you pay for things with Visa or Mastercard credit, they give you the blue dollar rate as well.

That volatility is common

Exactly, EUR/HUF rates would be infuriating in Hungary if I wanted to pay with EUR in restaurants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com