Canadians and a U.S credit card?
 

Anyone have one? I started looking into the process of trying to get an American Visa or Mastercard because the exchange rate is getting worse everyday.. Does anyone have one? I am being told there is lots of charges and it will take about 6 weeks to 8 weeks.

I tried to get one through Scotiabank, eventually I just gave up on it. They don't make the process easy or cost effective at all. Who're you trying to go through for yours?

Bank of Montreal or CIBC if i have to

i have a US $ visa with cibc and US $ master with bmo. cash cheques and take the money to pay my credit card then convert whats left to canadian to buy milk

a few years ago my friend got one quick from royal bank

Nice, how long did it take with BMO?

Now if only there were a BMO or CIBC within an hour and a half... :1orglaugh Fuck this living in the country shit sucks!

I drove down to the US, opened a bank account there and got a credit card.

4 weeks i think.

Which state?

I live close to Washington state. But any of the border states will have local banks that will hook up a Canadian. I had to give less personal info than i did at my bank in Canada.

i was thinking about taking a drive down to maine, but i didn't bother. thought it would be a pain in the ass to get shit hooked up

I have 2 US credit cards from Royal Bank. One for my business and one for me personally. I got them in under 2 weeks of requesting it. I try to keep all assets in US dollar given that the Canadian dollar and monopoly money are worth about the same these days. Royal Bank only has USD currency on its gold cards though but that also gets the added benefits of its reward/travel memberships.

WG

Fleet bank will take care of you.

why don't you just use paypal's or epasseporte?

wired, actually the CDN dollar went up like 8 points compared to a few months ago... I'm pissed.. loosing like 80$ every 1000 compared to last year heh

Yeah, I just noticed that too. I paid my office rent today from my US account and the exchange rate was shit. I was wondering if the banks raised their fees to convert or if the dollar was gaining. Since when does the Canadian dollar have value, I liked it before!

WG

http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/usbanking/checking.jsp

this might interest you. you get a visa check card. works great for me.

I found it was quite easy to get a US Funds Visa card in my own name (a personal card) from RBC. You just fill out the form you can get in any branch.

But unlike WG, it was quite a different story for me for a corporate USF card (in my business' name) - eventually after much runaround I was told they do it only in rare circumstances and special approval is required - in otherwords, my little half million dollar a year business wasn't enough for them to bother for me.

So anyway, my workaround is to use my personal USF card for my US expenses then I just reconcile it with my corporation.

Regardless of the exchange rate, a US Visa is a must in my opinion for all of us Canucks in the business. Most of our expenses are in US funds, and virtually all our income is in US funds - so if you convert the income destined for your expenses to CDN then convert it back to US to pay your bills, you lose 2% or so on each conversion. So that is 4% in total - so your bank is getting a 4% surcharge on ALL your US expenses. Fuck that!!

I had to do the exact same thing regarding using that personal visa for company purchases and I was told the same about the USD Visa's for corporations, requiring like $1MM in spending or something crazy like that. But about a year ago I went thru my investment broker at Royal Bank and he hooked it up for me (I didn't even fill out a single form). It's the exact same as the USD Gold Visa (personal) except it has my company name on it.

But your right, no way in hell am I going to let banks profit on currency exchanges, you gotta get a USD Visa to keep your expenses low, it's a necessity, not a luxury.

WG

Interesting. I'll have to work on my sweet little "RBC Investing Representative" and see if she can do the same thing for me. Good info. Thx WG.

By the way, I'm assuming you have a USD Account at Royal. When you talk to an investment rep, ask them to get the US Deposit Interest Plan. It's not offered to many people for some reason and it's pretty sweet. It's a 100% secure investment where you get 75% of the interest rate of the 90 day T-bill rate in the United States. It works out to about 0.5% greater than standard bank interest and you just have to keep your cash in your USD account, no actual investment and its fully secure.

WG

Wired, I'll try that US Deposit thing.... does it require a minimum?

I fear the dame rates will go down again.. was at 1.46 for christ's sake... was 1.54 not too long ago lOL