u/WellDoneWithKetchup1

I've been living abroad for a few years, earning and spending in the local currency, with a couple of US cards I kept for the credit history. Every month the statement shows up in dollars and every month I do the same useless thing: glance at the total, multiply by whatever rate is in my head, decide it's roughly fine, move on.

It bothered me enough that I started building something to fix it for myself, and now I've got far enough that I want a sanity check from people actually living this before I put more time into it.

The thing I keep running into is that my financial life has two currencies in it and nothing I use speaks both. My budget is in local currency because that's what I earn and what things cost. My card statement is in dollars. There's no view anywhere that shows me a month of spending in the currency I actually think in, and the bank's csv export doesn't even include the original local amount/rate, so I couldn't build it reliably in a spreadsheet either.

So what I've been building takes the statement pdf, pulls out every transaction with both amounts, and converts each one at the rate that actually applied on the day of that purchase rather than one rate for the whole month. What comes out is a month of spending in the currency you live in, per purchase, with the real rate on each line.

Running my own year through it turned up a couple of things I didn't expect. The conversion on my "no foreign transaction fee" card was costing about half a percent on average, which sounds like nothing until you notice it comes off your cashback: a "2%" card is really paying about 1.5% where I live. And it wasn't even consistent between cards - two of mine are from the same bank, same currency, same year, and they came out 0.44% and 0.58%.

What I'd like to know from people here, honestly:

Is this a problem you actually have, or have you solved it some other way I haven't thought of? I keep assuming everyone else has a system and I'm the only one eyeballing it.

If you do track it, what do you use? I've tried the budgeting apps and they either only handle USD, or want a subscription to get it approximately right.

And is the per-purchase rate detail interesting, or is it over-engineering? I built it because I wanted it, which is exactly how people build things nobody else needs.

Not linking anything, this isn't a pitch. I'm after whether the problem is real for other people or just for me.

I'll easily spend an evening arguing 5 basis points of expense ratio between two funds, but then convert a year of spending with a formula I never once checked. That's a gap in my own numbers I hadn't noticed until I looked.

American, living abroad. I earn and spend in the local currency , but I kept my US cards for the credit history (and the sweet perks 🍬) and they still handle most of my day to day spending. Every statement shows up in dollars, describing a life that runs in a currency it never mentions.

For years my method was the obvious one. Export the csv, drop it in a sheet, run =GOOGLEFINANCE against the transaction date. Clean output, plausible number, filed and forgotten.

That formula takes the amount I was billed and reapplies the market rate to it. But the market rate isn't the rate my card used. the merchant charged me in euros, my card converted that at its own rate, and the dollar figure on my statement already has that conversion baked in. Running the market rate over it a second time doesn't undo anything. It produces a second, wrong number that happens to look reasonable.

With round numbers: say something costs €1,000. At €1 = $1.10, that's exactly $1,100. My card bills me $1,105.17. My sheet takes that $1,105.17, divides it back by 1.10, and tells me the purchase cost €1,004.70.
but it didn't - it cost €1,000.
The spreadsheet is over by €4.70, precisely what the conversion took, and because the error runs the same direction every time, nothing in a year of totals ever looks off.

The actual local-currency amount is sitting right there on the pdf statement. The csv export drops it, and the csv is the one file a spreadsheet reads from. Three different banks, same story on all three: printed on the pdf, missing from the download.

I stopped trusting the csv and went through a full year of pdf statements instead, reading the local amount off each line by hand. 270 foreign transactions. On 94.8% of them, the rate my cards applied was worse than that day's market rate. Average gap: 0.47%.

Buttom line: a "2%" card is netting about 1.53% out here, and I'd been mentally banking the full 2% the whole time. And if part of the arbitrage that got you here in the first place is "my dollars go further in this country," a card quietly running 0.5% hot on every purchase is eating straight into that math, on a number your bank never shows you.

Two things I'd like to know: how you track US card spending out here, and whether any bank's csv carries the local amount instead of just the dollar total. Mine don't (C1, Citi, chase)