How cheap am I?

The fast few months, I've been cowering from knowledge about the energetic euro and its relationship to the debilitated dollar. The dollar, once the leader of the international pack, seems to sink to new and painful lows with every disastrous financial announcement coming from Wall Street and beyond.

Enough is enough. Self pity is not allowed for those of us who are planning 20-day vacations in Europe, especially when our cost-saving strategy is simply to eat more pizza (cheap, readily available, neverending list of topppings). Eating more pizza while in Italy--not such a hardship.

Pizza will help, but we are still looking for other ways to trim our budget. Today my mission was to research foreign exchange (fx) rates at nearby banks.

Unless you're buying 7 figures worth of foreign currency, you're going to pay a markup. Even ATM withdrawals in foreign countries come with a 1-3% surcharge, depending on your bank, not to mention a flat fee (at our bank, it's 3% + $5). I prefer to land with cash in hand so as to start the shopping immediately, so we have to buy some euros before we go.

Our bank's markup on foreign currency is 5%, which seems an astronomical fee to pay for the courtesy of acquiring legal tender. However, I discovered today that our bank's rates are better than most national banks. Except one.

One bank--which shall remain nameless because I'm not sure if what I'm going to do is kosher--charges only 4% if you purchase amounts over $1,000 (which we had planned to do anyway, considering that it would buy only about 600 euro--am doing my best not to break out a violin and play myself a sad little ditty).

And 4% is pretty close to 3% + $5 and is much better than 5%. For withdrawals of 300 euro or less, the 4% fee beats the ATM exchange rate (if I could insert tables into this entry, I would--I have an unnatural obsession with algebra and have been doing these calculations since I got home--I feel like I am cheating by using a calculator but the numbers have to be precise to make an educated decision).

There's a hitch, of course. You have to be a member of the bank to purchase foreign currency amounts in excess of $500 under some provision in the Patriot Act, which requires banks to have an established relationship with people who buy excessive amounts of foreign currency. Since when is spending $500 excessive? Clearly these people haven't seen our monthly grocery budget. But I digress.

I decided that there had to be a way around this issue (the schemer in me is always looking to pull off a harmless little caper), so I researched savings account and found an account that is free to open and has no fees. This weekend, we'll head down and make ourselves known to the bank (to satisfy the patriots among us), open our freebie account (I hope $5 deposits are allowed), and then start watching the market to figure out when we can get the best deal on euros.