The answer is yes you can.

Many companies offer a currency buy back service. They do vary quite widely though. The Post Office will only buy back currecy they sold to you in the first place. Other companies will often offer better buy back rates and will accept any currency as long as you send your currecy off to them and you accept the exchange rate they offer. We have our own currency buy back service and you can find it on our website.

It used to be that the most common way was by bank transfer or by a cheque through the post but now more and more currency suppliers are suporting creidt and debit card transactions and are waiving the fees for these as the market becomes more competitive.

The answer to the question is that you can pay whatever way you want you just have to find a supplier with decent exchange rates that offers the payment method you want to use.

We all want the best exchange rates right? As some of you will know I have been on our annual pilgrimage to Switzerland this week and this time I have taken the opportunity to compare the exchange rates offered in a local Bureau do change, heathrow airport and Euro Airport Basel. This is a fairly graphic demonstration of how much money you can save by not buying your currency at the airport. The only way to get the best exchange rate is to order it in advance.  Read more... (387 words, 5 images, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

Since the banking crisis in 2008 Australia has actually had a pretty strong economy and growth that would have George Osborne on cloud nine, at typically 3% or more for the past four years the Australian Dollar has been stable with fluctuations of plus or minus one or two percent.

You can see how the amount of Dollars you can buy has fallen since the banking crisis on 2008  Read more... (455 words, 2 images, estimated 1:49 mins reading time)

If you live in a tourist area it is really easy to have some really great stuff (attractions, parks and gardens etc.) on your doorstep and then never visit any of them. We live and work in St Ives in Cornwall and have some of the best beaches in the UK just 10 minutes from our front door. Although we do get to the beach over the summer we end up hardly going at all because if the weather isn’t glorious then you end up putting the beach off until you have a perfect summers day. In the last three years at least there have been very few perfect summers days and lots of overcast ones. During the winter we go to the beach almost every day, we enjoy the emptiness and storm sweptedness (a word made up by me for purposes of this blog) of the beach during the winter. Very occasionally we decide we are going to be a tourist for a day and we go to all those places that normally, as a local, you avoid like the plague. Places that are full of bloody tourists parking their cars everywhere and clogging up the pavements with their push chairs and walking down the middle of the road and suddenly stopping to look in shop windows.

If you are a local living in Cornwall, being called a tourist is not normally a compliment but having said that to be called local you need to be able to trace your family back ten generations or more to the same small village and have a surname starting with Tre- like Tevorrow or Treguna although you may get away with a Stevens or Symons if you are lucky.  Read more... (785 words, 2 images, estimated 3:08 mins reading time)