Noel Whittaker is the author of Wills, Death & Taxes Made Simple and numerous other books on personal finance. Email: [email protected]

This is being written from Boston as we complete the final leg of our annual trip to the USA to visit our son and his family. We normally just go to Los Angeles, which is their home, but this time we flew via Boston, as James was giving a major speech there. The contrast between the two cities is striking: LA is brown and dry, with freeways everywhere, whereas Boston is like a piece of London dropped into America. Boston’s buildings and parks are extraordinary, and much of the architecture reminds me of Mayfair.



Travel finance is always a hot topic, and the day before departure, my inbox was inundated with queries about Latitude Finance. After many years of their card having zero annual fees, they had just emailed all cardholders advising they were bringing in an eight-dollar-a-month fee. The big question from readers was, ‘What should we do?’

A quick look at Latitude’s annual report indicates why they need to increase their revenue. After copping a loss of $137.9 million, which included $68.3 million of costs related to a cyber-attack, they announced no dividend would be paid for the year ended June 2023. A $100 annual fee paid by each of their many cardholders would certainly help their bottom line.

The timing was perfect, as I just prepared my armoury of credit cards ready for departure. My major tools are currently my Wise card and my ING card. These are both debit cards with good conversion rates: one good thing about a debit card is you never come home to a large, unexpected credit card bill. I believed I would need a credit card for checking in at hotels, and I know that a normal Visa or Amex credit card does the job of acting as a guarantee for payments, but I make it clear I’ll be paying with my debit card, as I don’t want to be slugged by the high rates of exchange charged by most Australian credit cards.



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