Charles Schwab Account in Viet

I live here but do all of my banking out of the US through Schwab. As long as you let them know in advance, there will be no problem and they'll reimburse all of your ATM fees. Enjoy!

Thank

Last time I was in Asia (a long time ago, Philippines) I had so much trouble with the ATMs -- do you have any tips? Does it matter which ones you use?

What trouble did you encounter?

As long as you notify Schwab that you're traveling to these countries, you should be set. Otherwise, they may temporarily suspend your credit/debit card due to "suspicious activities."

Many ATMs in Vietnam have a withdrawal limit of 2mil, so you have to withdraw several times to get a sizable amount. The ATMs will charge an ATM fee each time, but I don't care about it as the fee gets reimbursed. Different ATMs have different fees too, but again because of the reimbursement I don't pay attention to them too much.

I guess an advice would be get a working US number through Google Voice. You can use that to call your banks for free through the internet, in case you need support from your bank.

I recall having 3 or 4 different cards but they only worked at Citibank ATMs. The other ATMs just failed, I don't recall the specified error.

I'm actually in Canada right now and my cards fail at most ATMs, but they always work when I'm paying for goods/services at a store.

And yeah, I've got the Google voice acct, and it was the reimbursement of bank fees which led me to charles Schwab; They seem to be fairly well regarded with the USA travel community.

Hello, try using commonwealth atms they have the higher limit some with 10 million Vietnam dong or hsbc, techombank 5 million , or vietinbank and agribank with 2 million limits but no problems