How much cash and when to buy?

[FlorayG]

I'm going for two weeks solo and onsite the whole time. How much cash would you take?
Also I'm going late September just before Brexit ( we hope!) I wasn't paying attention in March is it better to get cash now or near the looming date? Thanks

[Spike1911]

Depends what your planning to do but probably around $100 per day.

[COL41]

Worth checking your holiday insurance as think ours only covers £500 loss of cash. Normally take a mixture of preloaded cash cards, cash and credit cards

[traceyt]

Do you have the dining plan? If so you'll have more food than you can eat so it would just be gifts/treats. I go 27th sept and ive listed everything i'll need cash for - transfers from airport, taxi to mall, meal i'm paying oop for and so on, makes it easier to figure out how much to change. Anything I dont use I keep for next year anyway, but dont want to overbuy as the rate is so poor.

[vampiress88]

We took lots of cash and wished we hadn’t. We were offsite not on. Literally the only thing I actually “needed cash” for was when we ordered pizza to our villa and that was cos it wouldn’t accept English credit card online.

We used a travel credit card for everything. I had no transaction fees and plenty of time to pay it off when I got home (I already had the money though but always like a back up plan)

We used far less money than we thought so I am glad I didn’t take loads with me.

[cartoonp]

Depending on if you got the DDPand how much you spending on shopping . Me personally have a basic of 100 dollars a day if we have extra money left over then it just roll over we all so take a extra 500 dollars . That for 2 adults 🧑

[Grace_1412]

We take $1000 in case for 4 of us for 3 weeks, pays for tolls, tips and snacks when we are off site. For everything else we use the revolut card

[chmurf]

we basically take $200 cash per person, as a safety (we usually come back with them, or withdraw to replenish the reserve for next time)

the rest is take care of by no transaction/change fee cards. You'll find many talked about on here
we use Revolut for instance, but you'll find many names on the forum

we also have other cards, with fees, that we keep for safety, or to reload, free of charge, our no-fees cards.

we do not take a huge amount of cash. Because we find it unsafe.
Some will rather have all their money in cash, sometimes because it helps them visualise and manage their budget. Some even divide their cash into daily enveloppes, so they know where they stand on a daily basis.

there is no rule, or better option

are you confident having a huge amount of uninsured cash, or do you prefer not to have to use plastic money. Your choice will be the right one.


if you wonder if it's best to get currency now or closer to the date, i'd tell you that one way would be to get a revolut card
you could load it in british pounds, and then monitor the exchange rate. On the revolut app you can change pounds into dollars at the current realtime exchange rate, without fees

but that's still plastic money, and even though there is no limit to what you can spend at the stores or online, withdrawals of cash is only free up to £200 a month, after that there is a fee.

a good solution is to take a combination of both cash, and credit (or debit)

[Cez]

We usually take our Clarity card and then a few hundred dollars in cash for tips, parking etc. I suppose it depends what your planning to do and buy.

[Scaramouche]

We take a couple of hundred in cash each and the rest in TCs. We have our bank cards if we need them (we never have except for using Uber a couple of times).

We don’t pay for anything using TCs, we exchange for cash and we like doing it this way