Energy firms sitting on £3bn of our credit – how to get it back | Cheapest way to spend abroad

19:20Martin Lewis:Just don't do it. And hopefully things will come naturally to you as you start to get a student or whatever bank account as you go forward. And it will start to build a little bit more slowly, but you'll get there in the end. And in the meantime, she's not going to get the best details on broadband or energy because she can't get the direct debit and she's just got to suck that up. Yeah. Oh, Liz. Or parents sign up for her if that's possible, depending on the situation. Liz, it's a mad world and it gets madder, just so you know.

19:52Let's move on to, you know, look at the cheapest ways to spend money abroad. So why are we looking at that now, unless you're planning a sort of a Whitson bank holiday away?

20:03Martin Lewis:Well, first of all, because it's the type of thing to get sorted, and many of the solutions that you have are permanent solutions. So spending on plastic tends to be the very best route. So if you sort it now, you get it in your pocket, it applies every time you go away to every single country, it's great to have done. And there's also a new deal coming out today, which is a new Best Buy in the market. So I just want to go back to the basic premise. People need to understand what happens when you spend abroad on most plastic. On most plastic, there's a thing called a non-Sterling exchange rate fee.

20:36Martin Lewis:That fee is around 3 % typically. So what that means is if you pay on your card and you buy something that costs£100 worth of euros on that day, so that day's exchange rate, well, the bank pays£100 for that£100 worth of euros, or the card provider does, and you pay£103 for it. And there can be other charges too, such as withdrawing from a cash machine. And some debit cards even charge you a little bit extra just for spending on top of it. So the primary solution here is to get yourself a special overseas spending debit or credit, or in some cases, prepayment card. And what's special about those cards is they don't add the non-Sterling exchange rate fee.

21:23Martin Lewis:So if you pay for something that costs£100 worth of euros or£100 worth of dollars or Zolotti or ringgits or yen or whatever it is, it costs you£100. Meaning you get the same near perfect exchange rate as the bank or the card provider does. And right now I've got my list in front of me. I've got five cards. I'm not going to run through all of them. Just to give you an idea, well, we'll take first, we'll take the top, probably the top card at the moment, but it's a credit card, which means you will have to pass a credit check to get it, and not everybody will get it. You, of course, need to make sure that you pay the card off.

22:08Martin Lewis:Adrian? Yes. In full. In full. Adrian. In full at the end of every month. Otherwise, there will be high-interest charges. So let's just run through the first one. The new top pick is the Barclay Card Rewards Visa Credit Card. It's just overtaken the top credit card from the Lloyds Ultra Visa Credit Card. So on it, you get 1 % cash back on UK and overseas spending, almost all of it for a year. You only get it for a year if you apply via the app. If you apply online, it's six months. So you want to be applying via the app for that. That's 1 % cash back. So all of these cards give you near-perfect exchange rates.

22:47Martin Lewis:On this particular card, you're also getting 1 % cash back on your spending. So if you buy something that costs£100 worth of euros, effectively because of the cash back, it's only costing you£99. You're getting even better than the spot rates. You will, and the reason this has overtaken Lloyd's, which is also 1 % cash back on spending for a year, and both of them dropped to 0.25 % afterwards. The reason this is the new top pick is on, while they are both fee-free for taking money out of a cash machine, and they are both, you won't pay interest if you pay the card off in full on spending. On the Lloyds card, if you withdraw from a cash machine and pay the card off in full, you will still pay interest on the cash machine withdrawal.

23:32Martin Lewis:So, you know, it's about£1 per hundred for the month. Whereas on the Barclay card, you won't pay interest on the cash machine withdrawal, which is why it slightly sneaks above the Lloyds card in my top credit card pick. And of course, because these are credit cards, you get the full Section 75 protection, which means if you buy something costing between£100 and£30 ,000, whether in the UK or abroad, then the credit card company is jointly liable. Now, that's really useful when you're spending abroad, because what it means is if something goes wrong or it's faulty and you've just been to Brazil and you can't take it back to the shop in Brazil because that would be a very expensive flight, you can go to your credit card company and say, Oi, you're jointly liable on this.

24:12Martin Lewis:I want my repair or my replacement or whatever it is. I want you to fix it. And you have that right within Section 75. So overall, when it comes to cards, if it's a credit card you're after, Barclay Card Reward is my new top pick and that new 1 % deal launched today, only for new cardholders, of course. So why don't we do a question now and then I'll run through debit cards a little bit later. Joyce is hoping to go into Italy soon. She says if they don't run out of fuel. I was thinking of euros, i.e. cash, I assume she means, and some on a card. But which is best? I mean, that raised a question I was going to ask.

24:52If you want, for whatever reason, a sum of cash in your pocket, let's say euros, are you best just drawing those out of a machine or what?

25:04Martin Lewis:So, the best bureau de change in the UK are almost always beaten by the near-perfect exchange rate you get on plastic. When it comes to you want cash in your pocket, if you have a specialist card especially if it's one that does not charge you interest or withdrawal from cash machines abroad and as long as that is a country where the cash machines abroad do not charge you withdrawal fee some do some don't that's more difficult to tell you will be better off going to the airport when you arrive and withdrawing cash on the cash machine than you will be taking it out of a bureau de chance so if you want cash and you've got a specialist card it's doing it that way if you haven't got a specialist card or you've got one that charges you an ATM withdrawal fee then getting yourself onto there are a couple of them travel money comparison sites and finding yourself the very best rate for the cash when you get there and this is also good for a country where you're not sure that they will have and you will be able to spend or get your money out in cash once you arrive they won't have easy access to cash machines that operate with UK cards or some countries like Japan where not every cash machine will work on it then if you want to get a little bit of cash coming out first, then you want to go onto a travel money comparison site and operate it that way.

26:18Martin Lewis:But generally, the best way to get cash out is with the top specialist card. And you can't, obviously, you can't know the answer to this, but what about local bureau de charge? It's a really interesting question. So, there is an answer, actually. Yeah. If you're going abroad to a place that you've not been before and you're going to a small area that may have one or two Bureau de Changes abroad, it is very, very unlikely you will get a better rate from that one or two exchanges than you would from doing a comparison before you go of 40 exchanges or 50 exchanges in Britain, because then you're seeking across the market to get an entire rate.

27:00Martin Lewis:So on the strong balance of probabilities, if you want the cash, you would be better to get it before you go. I'm ignoring movements day by day in exchange rates because they're unpredictable if however you're going somewhere that you go regularly and you happen to know there's a bureau that gives you great rates and it's given you them before and it always tends to be competitive then it may be better to wait until you're abroad but that's quite an unlikely scenario but it does I'm just doing it as a caveat as some people say to me ah the place I go to in the middle of Greece they give amazing yeah there can always be one or two But I would always go for the knowledge of a broad spread comparison versus the random chance that the village you happen to be going to will have one of these surprisingly and sometimes questionably cheap exchanges.

27:49Martin Lewis:And we've got more of your questions on the cheapest way to spend abroad, including the top debit cards and prepay cards coming later in the pod.

28:00Martin, tell us about our TELUS this week.

28:02Martin Lewis:OK, so this week's tellers, when have your children impressed you with their financial knowledge? How old were they and what did they do? Why don't you start, Adrian? OK, Julie, my nine-year-old's always in charge of the scanner in Tesco's. I buy mostly the same things every week, so a rough idea how much it's going to be at the till. Last week, as we approached the fruit and veg, he said to me, Mum, this total is too much. My response was a deflated, I know, that's inflation, a bit of a shrug. He then decided to check through the list of things he'd scanned and found three items he'd scanned twice by mistake and removed them and saved us£7.82.

28:43But, Julie, what proportion of that£7.82 did you reward him with, or was it zero? Hold on, Adrian.

28:51Martin Lewis:I need to take you up on that. Go on. This was a young man who did brilliantly well. His maths was good, but his scanning ability was poor. I mean, he had double scanned in the first place. I'm not sure that we should be recommending that if nine-year-olds double scan and then tell you they've double scanned, they get a cut of what they've double scanned back. I mean, that's a perverse incentive. That's a moral hazard. It's a moral hazard. It's a moral hazard, I suppose. But look, he corrected himself. He'd spotted his flaws. He saw his mistake. He owned up. I think a reward with a pat on the back and a well done son is absolutely appropriate.

29:30Martin Lewis:But I just, I would beware this. You know, he sounds like a very savvy young man. He's going to work out quite quickly that if he overscans and then calculates it back and he gets 10 % of that, it could be quite a lucrative little business. OK. Peter. Yeah. When I was in financial difficulty and had to tell my then nine year old son I only had£20 for his Christmas present, He smiled and said, I can get two secondhand computer games from the market with that. So that's what we did. I love that. Good God love him. Heather, I... Can I just say, it's really interesting. I've met many families over the years who are going through financial difficulties, and especially in the run-up to Christmas, they're like, what are we going to do at Christmas?

30:07Martin Lewis:We don't want the kids to know. And certainly with teenagers, I tend to find that when parents do actually tell their children that there are problems with the finances, they get it. and they can help and they can work together. You don't want to worry them, you don't want to panic them. But having the conversations about money being limited is an important one to do. And I think Peter telling his nine-year-old son about cash being limited and his son getting it and smiling and saying, we can work something out. I think children tend to be more resilient on this and panic about it less than their parents.

30:41Martin Lewis:And I think the communication that Peter did is actually worth applauding too. You know, I was robbed once, but one of the things I went missing was a wallet and a credit card. And they found the credit card had been used and found what had been ordered and where it had been delivered. And it was a load of toys. And this was just before Christmas. And it, I don't know, I just, I don't know what I thought. It just felt profound in its own way. I thought I could understand somebody wanting at all costs to give their kids something for Christmas. On the other hand, perhaps we misjudge our own children in that regard.

31:22Martin Lewis:Well, perhaps we do, and perhaps that's not... Listen, it's not for me to tell people the real meaning of Christmas, but I did once interview the former Archbishop of Canterbury about it, and I asked quite an agendaed question, which was, how do you feel, as the head of the Christian Church in England, about the number of families who get into debt because of celebrating Christmas. And his big point is that isn't what it is about. It isn't about that. It's about celebrating, and gifts don't have to be financial. And you'll know I talk every year about packs to ban unnecessary Christmas presents to keep it short.

31:52Martin Lewis:Of course, the kids need something. But I think we... I go back to... A long time ago I did, and I did it for telly, but it was the most fascinating thing I ever did, is that we went to a school of six-year-olds and we said we had these presents in a room. It was near Christmas and there were these huge cardboard boxes wrapped up and the first thing we did is we said to them, I just want to know, all there is in the boxes are balloons and they opened them and there were these balloons and we supervised them. You have to be very careful with young children with balloons, please as a note. And the kids had so much fun just popping the balloons.

32:31Martin Lewis:They thought they were the best presents and then as an experiment, we gave them these big, said we're going to give you big wrapped up boxes and I told them in advance what was in them because I didn't want them to be disappointed and I said there's nothing in them and they were so excited again and they ripped open the packaging and they had these giant cardboard boxes that they thought were the best thing and they played for over half an hour they played for longer with the cardboard boxes when there weren't balloons in them than when there were balloons in with them and they were just excited to have the presents even though it was a cardboard boxes and they became tunnels and things to jump on and things to do.

33:06Martin Lewis:And I think that we sometimes bring our own retail snobbery, the idea that it's the price you pay for something that gives it the value, not the enjoyment you'll get from it. And we sometimes transport that onto our children and maybe we need to be careful not to do so. Text just in, Dave from Worcester. My mum always told me that when you get an ulcer on your tongue, it means you've been telling lies. I've had a few people say that to me. OK, let's move on. I make no comment on that. Adrian, I'd like to say I think you do really, really well in the mastermind. OK. All right. Enough said. You'll get another one now then for saying that.

33:40Shall we do... Heather. Heather. Yeah, I went on holiday leaving my 17-year-old£60 to feed her and her 16-year-old brother. I shouldn't say how long for. She was away on holiday for, but that's what she left,£60. And she spent just£20. I was tempted to put her in charge of the household budget.

33:59Martin Lewis:Why not? I tell you, one of the best, one of the ways I got into financial education that many people know I continue to campaign on to this day, and we're seeing, hopefully it's going to join the core curriculum next year. It's already on the curriculum, but that doesn't mean it has to be taught in schools. Is I did a programme called Teen Cash Class, where I went in and taught for a day a group of 15 year olds about money. And this was way before, it must have been, I don't know, 2006, 2005. And I obviously had to have supervision in the back of the class because I'm not a teacher and I wasn't part of the school.

34:29Martin Lewis:the person who saved the most money was the teacher at the back who was doing their finances the whole way through person who saved the second most amount of money was there was a young boy in the class who was very good at mass and his mum um was not a first language english speaker and was a cleaner on a very low income and he went home and put into practice all the things i'd said and i can't remember what it was but he saved us something like 1500 quid and from that day over onwards because he took over the household budget and I remember hearing later they were so much better off because he was quite, you know, he was good at his maths and he got into this and he started to do so.

35:06Martin Lewis:Putting a kid in hold of the household budget isn't the silliest thing in the world. Katie, my son was seven and I needed to borrow some cash from his money box to pay the window cleaner. He charged me interest at a daily rate. Wow. Okay. Some people would say he's going to be a banker. Okay, yes. And Joanne, when my daughter Katie was nine she said to me very loudly in Tesco's stop spending money we don't have on things we don't need. Blimey. Now she's an adult, I let her look after all her household finances. I should think so. And we'll finish on this one probably. Jen. Oh, I had the cutest moment.

35:41Martin Lewis:My older child was talking to their girlfriend about her new job and asked if she paid tax. She was 16 and had no idea what tax was. Gobsmacked. My other child, only eight years old, popped up and explained, It's money you pay to the government and they use it and then they give you some money when you're old. We were all suitably impressed. Funny, I remember having the discussion about tax with my daughter when she was about eight, trying to explain it to her and go through the whole point of taxation and how it works. It's a good conversation to have. It's a great test. My younger daughter was asking me how mortgages work and you start thinking, hang on, am I explaining this properly?

36:19I mean, just explaining the basics. I mean, there's no better person in the world than you, than doing it. But, you know, I think I just about got away with it. But put it like this, I'm glad you weren't listening in, Marty, or I might have been in trouble.

36:35Now, just going back to spending money abroad, Bob's got a question that I would also like to ask. Is Halifax Clarity still a good card for overseas spending? So the cards I'm listing today

36:46Martin Lewis:are my absolute top picks at the moment. Now, there are actually quite a lot of specialists overseas travel cards, of which Halifax Clarity credit card is one of them. It gives you near-perfect exchange rates, just like the Barclay cards and the Lloyd cards that I've mentioned, and it's a credit card too. But it doesn't give you the cash back, so it isn't my top pick. But there's nothing wrong with it. You'll still get a decent exchange rate, and there are lots of other cards in that category. So please don't read, just a people, please don't read that the top picks mean the one you've got that used to be a top pick is worthless.

37:19Martin Lewis:As long as it doesn't add a non-stirling exchange rate fee, it can still be good to use. Two questions I've got on this. Full disclosure, I've got the clarity card. And can those terms and conditions change? Can it stop being a good one for travel? Yes, it can, but not without notification. OK, but in practice, what does that mean? One of a million alerts that could be a marketing thing, another piece of paper through the post or something you don't spot. Well, Halifax Clarity was my top pick, cheapest card for spending overseas for a number of years. So if it did change, you can... First of all, I'll tell you, Adrian, we'll probably be doing it on here because I'll be loudly and proudly warning people to get rid of it and get themselves a new cheap overseas spending card.

38:04Martin Lewis:They tend not to, though, because these cards, it's their big sell. I mean, if you look at that card, it's not particularly good for spending in the UK. It doesn't give you anything else. It's just a normal credit card. As long as you pay it off in full, there won't be any interest. It's big sell. The reason people went for it, the reason so many people like you have it, is for cheap spending abroad. So I think they're aware that they would have really big exodus if they were to change the terms. And also, mysteriously, it's gone from being a MasterCard to a Visa. Yeah. Does that make any difference at all to me?

38:35Martin Lewis:So we once spent 90 days, it was, analysing the spot rates on MasterCard and Visa. So let's just get technical. You have a spot rate, that's the market rate, but there is also a Visa, a MasterCard and an Amex wholesale rate. So if you provide a Visa card, the exchange rate, the underlying exchange rate you get is the Visa wholesale rate. If it's a MasterCard, it's the MasterCard wholesale rate. And then you have that non-sterning exchange rate fee that they add on top. There are slight differences between Visa and MasterCard. And we found, if I remember rightly, MasterCard won on a few more days than Visa did.

39:13Martin Lewis:But the difference was very small. and some days Visa beat Mastercard. So does it make a difference? Yes. Is it a noticeable difference? Not really that much. And I would be judging more on do you get the extra 1 % cash back than the underlying wholesale rate because it's really difficult to do and it depends on lots of countries. But it does, they are slightly different firms and they can on a day have, you know, but you're talking, you know, slight amounts of decimal point percentages change, nothing major. OK. Sue, when booking overseas accommodation online via booking.com, is it best to pay in local currency or in pounds?

39:51Martin Lewis:OK. So let's just be very plain. Whatever type of plastic you have, the safest thing to do is pay in the foreign currency. So if you're in Europe, it's euros. If you're in America, it's dollars. Whatever country you're in, pay in the local currency. The reason is then your card is doing the conversion and that is at a known rate. Many times when you're paying on a foreign website, if you say I'll pay in pounds, it means they are doing the currency conversion for you. And the rates you get are generally, I don't know specifically for Booking.com, far worse than the rate you'd get converting yourself.

40:33Martin Lewis:But of course, even better is you get one of these specialist cards where you're getting a perfect exchange rate. But I know people who get one of these cards and then they go abroad and then they pay in pounds. Well, then it's the shop abroad that's doing the currency conversion and you're not getting the gain of the specialist cards. So paying euros or paying dollars, if you're paying on a foreign currency, don't let the shop do the conversion. Don't pay in pounds. OK, but if I'm on booking.com, sitting in this country using booking.com, and I'm paying for something in Italy or wherever, then...

41:08Martin Lewis:It depends what the pricing is. So if it's priced in pounds when you're going there, you're paying in pounds. If it's priced in dollars and asking if you want to convert it to pounds, then you don't want to do that generally. Now, look, the easy way to do this, especially if you've got a specialist card, is take that amount that you're being asked to pay in euros, find what the spot rate is on the day. So just put in spot rate euros. You don't want a holiday rate. you want a spot rate. Remember that phrase. And then do the conversion yourself. And that's roughly the rate you'll get on a specialist card, not one of the other cards, and compare that.

41:45Martin Lewis:And generally you will find you're getting a better rate with your card during the conversion because it's at a near perfect rate. What about debit cards on this? Okay, so one of the advantages of debit cards is with the right debit cards, they can be far easier to get. There are two I would name, the Trading 212 Debit Mastercard and the Chase Debit Mastercard. To get the Trading 212 card, you can get it via its free investment account, but you don't need to invest, but you need to get the investment account to get it. To get the Chase card, you get it via its bank app, but you don't need to switch, so it can be operated just as a standalone card.

42:18Martin Lewis:The big advantage of both of these is you don't do a credit check, so they are far easier to get. The Trading 212 card gives you 1.5 % cash back on almost all UK and overseas spending, but only till the 31st of July. it's half a percent after that. You need to enable cashback investing to do this, but it should work for you. The Chase card doesn't give you cashback abroad, gives you some cashback, a limited cashback on UK spending. Both can be done without a hard credit check. Both, obviously, because there's no overdraft facility, you can't be charged interest on spending on ATM withdrawals. Both will allow you fee-free ATM with cash withdrawals, although trading 212 is quite limited.

42:57Martin Lewis:It's£400 a month. Chase is£1 ,500 a month. Compare that to Barclay card that's£500 a day. So you can get a lot more there. And while they don't have Section 75 protection that I talked about on the credit cards earlier, they do have chargeback protection. It's a lesser protection, but it still could help. Those are the easy standalone cards. You've also got First Direct and Santander and Lloyds, which all, if you switch to them, will be giving you bank... We talked about bank switching last week, so I'm not going to go into detail. You know,£175,£200 for switching to them. and they also have near-perfect exchange rate debit cards too, but for those, you would have to switch bank account.

43:36Martin Lewis:I might do a few more of these on the pod, but it's time to ask you some questions, Adrian. Let's play it.

43:48Martin Lewis:Welcome to Money Mastermind. Adrian, I am delighted. Last week, you got the question right, which means the score stands at you've got 19 right and 37 wrong in this three-option multiple-choice quiz, which means after a long time, I can finally say you are doing... B-R-C. Very, just slightly better than random chance. OK. You're doing it. You've got there. Well done. I even saw a smile there. Did you just smile? It was a wan. It was a wan, wintry kind of smile. We'll take it. I love that you've said this is a hard one because it's like going... you know, it's like a team going away to play Man City when they're in full flow.

44:33And you think, well, it doesn't matter, no expectations, doesn't matter if we lose. So I feel relaxed. Let's see. We're doing very well today, aren't we?

44:42Martin Lewis:You're all working through. So the question, Adrian, you've gone into a shop and you bought yourself a brand new tablet. Not a Statin, nor a Viagra. We're talking a 12-inch, a digital monitor-type tablet. Okay. And as luck would have it, with the tablet, the retailer had a promo that you get a totally free fitness tracker too. How exciting. You plan to get more steps in the 90s Pop Band reunion tour. Sadly, though, tragedy strikes. Sorry, I enjoyed that. As your tracker is faulty and resets every time you hit 100 steps. So here's the question. Five, six, seven, eight. Normally, that's my last steps reference.

45:24Martin Lewis:Normally, the rule for faulty items is if you return it within 30 days, you can demand a full refund. Yet here, the tracker was a free add-on. So I'm going to give you three legal rights. I want you to tell me the last one that is true. So it's either just the first is true, or the first two are true, or all three are true. Do you see what I mean? Blimey, you're messing with my mind here. Right, go on. So the first one is you can reject the tracker for a full refund of what you paid, but as it was free, frustratingly, that's nothing. OK? The second one is you can get a refund for the effective commercial value of the tracker.

46:05Martin Lewis:The third one is you can legally get a full refund for the whole thing, the tablet and the tracker. So either just the first is true or the first and second is true or the first, second and third is true. Now, I need to be straight with you listeners. this is a slight grey area that can be disputed. So we are going with the Gold Standard ruling which is specifically retired District Judge Stephen Gold author of Gold's Law ruling who I consulted on this. So we are going with his answer. So it is the Gold ruling. He also may well be my mother-in-law's partner. So it's a family ruling if you like.

46:44Martin Lewis:Do you understand? First one reject the chacker for a full refund but there's note of what you paid but you didn't pay anything. Second one, you can reject the tracker for a full refund of the effective commercial value of the tracker. Third, you can legally get a full refund on the whole thing, the tablet and the tracker. You're missing out the most obvious remedy, which is to give you a new tracker, which actually works. Well, you could ask for a repair or a replacement, but as it's within 30 days, you have refund rights. So I want to know which of these three you could do. But you are right, you could ask for a new tracker.

47:21Martin Lewis:Absolutely. Okay. Okay, so one you're giving me... Well done for knowing that, but generally within 30 days you get entitled to refund. After 30 days, it lowers to a repair or replacement or partial refund. I think improbably, but I think it's probably all three. I think there's a logic when you think about it, saying, well, you might have bought that tablet in the first place because you were attracted by the free fitness tracker. So once the fit, and that was part of the package, so if the part, so it's one whole basically, and if any part of it isn't working, so to all intents and purposes, it's like one button not working on the tablet.

48:02Yeah. Part of the tablet isn't working on the tablet. So I would say all three apply.

48:06Martin Lewis:So, now what I'd like, If you're at home, I'd like you just to say out loud, so that you're locking yourself in, what your answer to this question is. Now, Adrian, are you locking in? A, you can reject the tracker for a full refund, but it's free. B, you can do that, and you could get the effective commercial value of the tracker. Or C, you can legally get a full refund on the whole thing, the tablet and the tracker. I'm saying all three. It's locked in, even though I know it's wrong, because you're all chirpy. I can hear it in your voice. No, that's not correct. I want you to succeed. OK, I think it's all three, yeah.

48:36It's C. Adrian's locked in.

48:39Martin Lewis:There's our tension bed. So, Adrian, you can reject the tracker for a full refund, but as it was free, frustratingly, that is nothing. So that's a pretty worthless option. I had thought that the answer beforehand, I was with you, that it was C, because I would say this is part of the complete package. But retired district judge Stephen Gold says he believes generally this would be done as a severable contract. So there are effectively two different contracts to the two items. And therefore, I'm afraid C is wrong. OK. Uh-uh. So if I get a competing... If I get another judge to say something different, can I have the point back next week?

49:23Martin Lewis:Sorry, what's that? Can I have the point back next week if I find another judge who said something different? No, you can't, but I just need to explain. But he would argue strongly that you could get the effective commercial value of the tracker.

49:39Martin Lewis:Right, so we've just finished the Five Live recording and I was crashing up close to the news, so didn't get time to properly explain this rather complicated mastermind answer. And of course, remember that some of this is the interpretation of Judge Gold, so I'm going to explain it his way. When I discussed it with him, he said, because it wasn't a question of this was a tablet that was bought to facilitate use of the fitness tracker. They were two different deals. They would probably most likely be structured as severable contracts. So they're two different contracts within the same purchase.

50:13Martin Lewis:And therefore, it would be very difficult to demand that the tablet was faulty because the fitness tracker was faulty when they were separate contracts in effect. However, he then went on to argue because the offer of the fitness tracker was material in your purchasing decision, it was a part of the reason that you purchased it, and that that tracker was faulty, then you would have a right to demand a refund for the effective commercial value of the tracker. Now, the phrasing here is crucial. You would have a right to demand it. My suspicion in practice is the shop would say no, and the store would say absolutely not.

50:51Martin Lewis:This was a free tracker. We would give you a replacement. We're not giving you a refund to the tracker. So ultimately, as is always the problem with consumer rights law, to enforce that, you would need to go to court and get a judge to rule on it. Now, if he wasn't retired and you were sitting in front of him, you went to Judge Gold, what he's effectively saying, and of course, it depends on the exact structure, is he would say that you were entitled to a commercial refund, but another judge may take a different decision. So I thought it was a fascinating question a legal grey area when I made it up and I wanted to know what the answer was and what I found out is well I've given you one answer but Adrian was probably right there is always a chance a different judge would give you a different answer so probably the easiest thing to do in practice exactly as he said would be to simply say can I have a new fitness tracker please this one's broken.

51:44Martin Lewis:Now so as we're pod only I'm joined by PPS podcast producer Simon hi Simon how you doing i'm excellent thank you delighted to be here and you've moved house and you've survived it i moved house i went on holiday it's all going well i'll tell you something about the new house yeah that you'll enjoy yeah is so we've now got a garage and i've never had a garage before so i'm not even certain how to pronounce it and my big court yeah my big contribution is that i've kind of nailed a cricket ball on a piece of string to sort of like the roof at the back of it so i I can now practice my batting. Well, considering I saw the scorecard of your last batting, and let's just say you didn't trouble the scorers even a little bit.

52:26Martin Lewis:I mean, they didn't have to move the score for you at all. I mean, you quacked. Well, awfully. I've played another game since then. I've got another third ball dunk. I wasn't even going to bring it up. I felt awful. So I've played twice. I've not scored a single run yet this season. Okay, well, let's try and score a run in here. We've got a few more questions, I think, on currency and spending abroad. Shall we do those? Yeah, we got one from David. He asks, is it better to use cards or cash in America as I know they haven't embraced contactless payments like in the UK? And what is the best option for mobile, a bolt-on or a second SIM?

53:02Martin Lewis:OK, so if you're going to the States, I would absolutely continue to use cards. Yes, you're right. You may not be able to beat them, but you can still pay with them and it's still pretty easy to do and they are absolutely ubiquitous there. Again, you need one of the specialist overseas cards. I've mentioned the Barclay card and the Trading 212. I've mentioned Chase. Any of those would do. And of course, Trading 212 and Chase are easier to get and can just be used as standalone or a first direct card or whatever one of the specialist ones is. And I would be doing that abroad. And if you want to get your cash out, you could get your cash out that way too.

53:32Martin Lewis:And it would be easier. I mean, you have to think about tipping in the States where it all gets very confusing that they have service charges and then tips on top and it all does get difficult. But yeah, In the States, I would, you know, when I've been, I find cards very easy to do when you're over there. As for mobiles, a bolt-on or a second SIM, I mean, it can be expensive in the States. It depends what particular package your network is on. I would probably be using an eSIM. So I'd be getting myself an eSIM for the States. Probably cost you about a tenner for 10 gig that would last a month.

54:02Martin Lewis:It's where it effectively, nothing physical goes in your phone, but it redirects your data through the eSIM provider. and then you can use WhatsApp and stuff when you're over there. And that's a very easy way to use a mobile when you're in the States. Some give better signals than others. I mean, the one advantage of an eSIM is if you get there and the signal is pants on the eSIM that you've chosen, well, you could ditch it for another one, just get yourself on Wi-Fi, ditch it for another one and set up a new eSIM when you're there and it shouldn't be that difficult to use. Elizabeth wants to know, I have both a FairFX and Caxton card.

54:33I'm planning a trip to New York in a few weeks. Should I stick with those or look for something else?

54:38Martin Lewis:Well, they're both pretty good. They're prepayment cards where you load the card up with money in advance and you spend it. So slightly different to the debit and credit cards. Now, the thing to watch generally with prepayment cards, the other good one is Revolut. The thing to watch generally with prepayment cards is are you getting the rate on the day you spend or on the day you load? There are no negatives or positives involved in that. It's just worth understanding. So all the cards I've talked about before are rates on the day you spend. So remember I use my careful phrasing,£100 worth of euros, because£100 worth of euros changes by the hour, depending on exchange rates and movements.

55:16Martin Lewis:And we don't know those exchange rates, so they are just about settling for today's exchange rate. Now, what you can do with some prepayment cards, and the way some work, is they will give you the rate when you load up. So let's just play this through for a second. Imagine that three weeks before you went on holiday, or three months before you went on holiday, you went and bought your euros on a card. It's a bit like going to a bureau de change and buying your euros. You have just locked in that exchange rate. Now, if the pound gets weaker, so it buys less euros, you will do well. If the pound gets stronger, so you could have bought more euros if you waited, you would lose.

55:57Martin Lewis:so you are effectively by locking in that rate you're taking a little bit of a play on the currency exchange rates and there's nothing wrong with doing that it may well win for you and you could argue you're doing the same if you use the cards that give you the rate on the day that you spend because it all depends on the rate on the day that you spend so in practice those cards depending how the structures are pretty good they're both good overseas spending cards but it's all about which rate you get now some people might say ah you've just confused me totally which one should i go for should i lock well the first thing to say is if you like the rate at the moment and that would give you enable you to work on your budget then locking in right now by getting it on the rate you load up the money you get the the exchange rate on the rate you load is nothing wrong with it but one thing that you could do is hedge you could do a bit of both you could get a card or you could get cash that loads up your money now at today's exchange rate and for about half your spending and then for the other half you could use one of those cards that gives it you on the rate on the day.

56:55Martin Lewis:And then you're getting, if things do move, you're getting somewhere in the middle, a little bit of a safety way go through it. The problem is the only way to really know what would be best is to have a crystal ball. And they're not available at the moment. Well, they're just very expensive. I mean, I've got one, but I mean, it stopped working and I tried, but I was outside the 30 days so I couldn't get a full refund. Carry on. Will I get any runs between now and the end of the season? Have you put that into your crystal ball yet? If you don't, I'll give you some emodium.

57:25We had this question from Andrew. He's going to Bruges for a week and wondered, as the BNB will be cheaper, if he pays in cash, euros, where is the place to get the cash, England or in Bruges?

57:36Martin Lewis:So I sort of answered this with Adrian earlier. The safest place to get yourself a decent rate of cash if you actually want cash is a Bureau de Changes comparison site here before you go. But if you have a specialist overseas card, then it is getting it out of a cash machine once you arrive in Bruges assuming that that cash machine doesn't have a big ATM charge and even if it does have an ATM charge let's say of two or three euros and you're needing to get out six seven hundred that's still probably cheap because two euros on six seven hundred is not big I mean if it's two euros on fifty euros that's a big charge two euros on six hundred euros well it's effectively depreciated across the whole value so it works and a final one from Matthew you I have recently received a letter from one of my credit card providers inviting me to increase my credit limit from 3 ,000 to 4 ,950.

58:27It is Halifax Clarity credit card and I only use it for spending when I'm abroad about once a year and not for everyday spending as it doesn't offer rewards that suit me compared to my other store credit card. My initial thought is to increase the credit limit as you never know what might happen when you're abroad but how would this affect my eligibility for borrowing on other products that I might use more frequently? What an interesting

58:49Martin Lewis:question, Matthew. And yes, you're using the Halifax Clarity in exactly the right way. I've said it earlier in the show, credit scoring is art, not science. So I'm going to give you a best guess answer rather than the firm answer. Interestingly, what you're actually describing in the way that you're assessed for credit when they look at your credit balances, you're not saying you would increase your debt. You're saying you would increase the credit facility, but not the actual borrowing, because it sounds like you understand what you're doing. So increasing the debt would be a problem. You are actually arguably decreasing your credit utilisation.

59:23Martin Lewis:So credit utilisation is the proportion of your credit you're actually using. So if you have a bigger credit limit and the same amount of debt, you are decreasing your credit utilisation, which is often a positive sign. So doing this perversely won't have a big impact. I think it would either have very little impact at all or it could minorly improve your credit worthiness when you apply for other products so I wouldn't be that bothered about it what would hurt is if you get a£5 ,000 credit limit and you're holding a balance at nearly£5 ,000 and you're constant that would be a problem because then it's the debt and the increased debt that's the issue the increased credit not being used that much can actually be very minorly beneficial for you And that, I think, is where we should end for today.

1:00:10Martin Lewis:So hopefully you've all got your direct debits to check. You'll be preparing your overseas spending cards to make sure you get maximum bang for your buck when you're away. And you'll be looking at your children to see, have you got any financial tips for me?

1:00:29Martin Lewis:That is it for this week. We tend to put out a new episode every Thursday and Monday, which is our Question Time podcast, where you can ask me absolutely anything and everything, open brackets, within reason, closed brackets. If you've enjoyed today, please tell your friends you've been listening to the Martin Lewis podcast and why not subscribe? Then your pockets will be pleased with you. And if you haven't enjoyed it and you've been listening this long, I mean, I'm going to stop holding my tongue in the position I am. It's hurting again now. I'm going back to slurring and this is all your fault.

1:01:00Martin Lewis:I've worked this hard. I've kept going. I'm in pain and you didn't even enjoy it.

1:01:33emailing martinlewispodcast at bbc.co.uk. The offers and rates mentioned in the podcast are correct at the time of recording. However, if you are listening on demand, it's worth double-checking as details can date. Remember to subscribe on BBC Sounds and leave us a review however you listen.