Good credit card for living abroad (eg no foreign transaction fees)?

October 17, 2023 7:26 PM

I am an American moving to Japan and figure this would be good to have. More details within!

Ironically, I currently live in China, but I ended up getting integrated into the Chinese payments ecosystem pretty quickly and it was never terribly important. I plan to do the same in Japan, of course, but I think there will be a lot of incidentals and whatnot, and living abroad it'd be good to have regardless...more just something I've put off doing up to now.

So ideally, a card with cheap/no fees that works well abroad (so no foreign transaction fees etc). Beyond that I can't really think of nice to haves, I mean some cards give cash back etc etc but usually they have an annual fee.

I'll also want to get a card with my wife's name on it so she can use, but it'd be my account. But I don't think that should be a problem, regardless of what card I get? It was very easy for my current card

And of course if you have a suggestion that is related to "cheaply paying for things in japan/while traveling internationally" but isn't quite a credit card, I'm all ears (maybe I should consider the wise debit card, hmm)

posted by wooh to Work & Money (8 answers total)

Fidelity has a flat 2% cashback Visa card with no foreign transaction fee.

Another good option might be the Apple card, if you have an iPhone and use Apple Pay often.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:45 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wise has a debit card that allows you to bulk convert cash to your target currency for a low fee and then do with it as you will. I'm not a huge fan of paying with debit card so I would take cash out of an ATM and use that, but you certainly can use it as a payment card if that's inconvenient.

Cards will have both a transaction fee and a rate. The rate will be marked up from the real spot rate, and it hard to tell how much that markup will be, transaction fee or no.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:08 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nerdwallet is a good place to look for recs of this sort.
posted by nat at 1:51 AM on October 18, 2023

This might be useful if you decide in the end that you also want a local Japanese credit card and bank:

https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/wiki/credit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/wiki/finances/
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:36 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apple Card.
posted by terrapin at 7:09 AM on October 18, 2023

We have had good luck with the Chase Sapphire card as our credit card and a Charles Schwaab card as an ATM card. Neither have foreign transaction fees, which especially comes in handy with the Schwaab card to access cash. We spent 1.5 years traveling in SEA and only had one issue with my Schwaab card getting eaten by a wonky machine (but the bank was able to recover it for me!).
posted by something_witty at 8:53 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I travel a lot and I use Chase Sapphire. If you can catch them when they are doing 60k points as a sign on bonus, do it! I pay for everything with mine and I can't remember the last time I had to pay out of pocket for airfare or hotels. And the points are good for tons of stuff, not just flights.
posted by ananci at 1:53 PM on October 18, 2023

And of course if you have a suggestion that is related to "cheaply paying for things in japan/while traveling internationally" but isn't quite a credit card, I'm all ears (maybe I should consider the wise debit card, hmm)

PayPay! It’s a QR payments app, and you can top off your account with cash at any 7-11 ATM (using the QR code “payment” feature: scan the QR code on the ATM, enter the number code in your PayPay app, deposit cash, voila!)

Many, many stores here now take PayPay, and you can even add it to your phone lock screen if on iOS. It’s soooo speedy; I love it. You also get a small number of points back per purchase. I use it for most of my daily lunches, and I probably get a return of 500-1,000 points (yen) over the course of the month.
posted by lesser weasel at 5:36 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]