Review – Caxton FX Prepaid Euro Credit Card

• No fees – so we can withdraw small amounts of currency at cashpoints (usually the fees are a percentage of cash withdrawn and have a minimum and maximum fee amount) 
• Simple, quick and easy to load money onto it
• Simple, quick and easy to check your balance
• It’s a Mastercard so can be used pretty much everywhere
  
• You can have several currencies on the card
• Cheap to get a second card (about £7 I think) as back up in case one gets lost – although they will post one to you if needed
• It’s separate to your normal bank, so if it gets stolen the maximum that could be got off it is what’s loaded onto it

• The exchange rate isn’t as good as some of the other cards, but for me that is offset by having no fees
• My bank sends me a SMS statement every week, it would be nice if Caxton FX could do this too – it would save you from having to log onto their website while travelling
• If you are buying fuel from an automated petrol station the station reserves a sum on your card in addition to what you have paid for the fuel. This sum is released after a couple of weeks, but if you are doing a lot of driving in one go, you can soon find yourself unable to use any of the balance on your pre-paid card.

2017 Update – We still use our Caxton card. In addition we also have a Halifax Clarity Credit Card which is fee free for transactions, so we use this for big purchases (supermarket) as the rate is usually better, and for when filling up at automated petrol stations as the credit card balance is big so it doesn’t matter if it gets held as a deposit for a couple of weeks, unlike the cash on the prepaid card. As the Halifax card charges interest on cash withdrawals, we always use the Caxton card.