Prepaid debit card - Correos or other

[1bassleft]

Would appreciate any advice/suggestions for a prepaid Mastercard or Visa card, preferably that can be got online and bought/reloaded using a non-Spanish payment method (card or Paypal).

I'm non-res but have a Spanish bank a/c, although I just use it for regular outgoings, and my UK a/c and cards do the majority of my purchases. I have no probs withdrawing from ATMs of course, and on the infrequent occasions I purchase fuel or in-shop items by card. Lots of brick walls, I don't understand why, if I use UK Visa Debit or credit cards on Spanish websites. e.g., I can't top up my Simyo and have to go to a Fuengirola tech shop with cash, a spare part in Barcelona couldn't be bought either from the breaker's own website nor Recambioverde and I had to transfer (rather expensively) from my ES bank's branch to theirs.

I thought I'd get myself into the 21st C in Spain and get a Spanish-based prepaid card for easier online purchases and the Correos website seemed to have the MC I needed: €6 to initialise and either €1 in the Correos branch or €2 online ( ) charge to top up. Again, though, even the Correos website wouldn't take my cards as payment. So, I got cash and went to the Correos branch in Carrefour Torremolinos. None in stock. I went to the fairly sizeable Benalmadena branch. None in stock - "try Malaga". I'm back in the UK now and will be driving down in June; would have liked a Spanish prepaid to take with me but ah well. Do the larger city Correos have them, does anyone know? Perhaps you know of an alternative? Cheaper is nice, but reliable and not a wasted journey is better. If I could pull into a branch of something, somewhere just south of the Pyrenees and get one on the spot that would be a big bonus. TIA for any suggestions.

[wollie]

revolut

This is what i use, just google it....

[Paddy Pumpkin]

Second the vote for Revolut. They will deliver it to your house. Just put the app on your phone and follow the instructions

It is brilliant. Load immediately using a debit card (Uk or Spanish banks). Suspend card on app when you are not using it for safety. Immediate notification on app when payment made. Control if you want to allow online spending (switch on or off immediately) so I now use it for all my online shopping

Exchange rate cannot be beaten (There is no spread between buy and sell rate) so you can load it with GBP and convert to EUR or vice versa. YOu can even then send EUR to your Spanish bank account (transfers in and out are free for EUR and GBP)

I don't work for them! but it is excellent

[1bassleft]

Sounds very useful, in fact much more so than the Correos prepaid (a long time ago I had a FairFX but that just quietly sucked the balance dry while I wasn't using it). I'll have an online look at Revolut now.

[1bassleft]

The only thing I can't confirm from reading, but perhaps someone here can, is that the Revolut virtual card (or plastic, but virtual would be fine for my purposes) carries out online (.es) purchases without problems. That's where my UK-based cards fall down, perhaps because their balance is in GBP.

OOPS. Just re-read "I use it for all my online spending", Paddy. Can I assume that, as well as ebay, Amazon etc, it's been successful with more parochial sites. If it's worked on a .es site in your experience, that's a clincher.

[Paddy Pumpkin]

no problem so far for any online shopping including more local sites. I also use it as the payment card for Paypal, as Revolut is also a bank account you can use it to pay direct debits etc........but as always never say never.

Spain is the only country I have ever come across where some companies reject some cards solely on the basis that the card is not issued by a Spanish bank. The more local websites I find are more and more accepting Paypal to get around this.

It is free get it and try, nothing to lose.

[1bassleft]

Thanks for responding so soon. I had no other worries (Section 75, FCSC etc) as I just had annoying hassles attempting to get something on some sites. I'd just put enough on it to carry out the transaction. A part in a breakers is a one-off, Simyo more regular (apart from the drive, the shop rounds to the nearest €5 so I buy unwanted call mins or settle for a higher/lower data limit than I want) and Correos itself was a bit of a surprise. My son mentioned that some Korean girls used their home Visa cards, contactless, in a small UK indy supermarket with no issues which was a bit of a contrast.

I hope Revolut would allow me to pay Simyo and similar bugbears but, if it didn't, I can use it elsewhere or send it to either a/c without losses so it's worth a go. The Correos pre-paid card would doubtless be accepted, but it's getting hold of the blighter.

[wollie]

no problem so far for any online shopping including more local sites. I also use it as the payment card for Paypal, as Revolut is also a bank account you can use it to pay direct debits etc........but as always never say never.

Spain is the only country I have ever come across where some companies reject some cards solely on the basis that the card is not issued by a Spanish bank. The more local websites I find are more and more accepting Paypal to get around this.

It is free get it and try, nothing to lose.

Paddy,
Are you saying that it is possible to set-up a direct debit with Revolut in Spain?
I have tried to set up dd with credit card but refused as card not issued in Spain.

Bassleft,
Basically the reason i have the Revolut card is to buy the currency at time of my choosing.
At this moment for example the €1 = £0.881 online. Revolut transfer rate for €1 = £0.881.
How it works is you transfer from your own bank to Revolut in your home currency.
Then exchange in-house Revolut to pretty well any currency of your choosing in the world.
There are no transfer fees with this unless very large amounts.
Card transactions are free and we can use at ATM max £200/Month
I cannot understand how it works..

[Paddy Pumpkin]

Yes. You can set up direct debits in EUR and GBP. It is not a credit card but a bank account and debit card. Now whether the bill issuer will accept a non Spanish bank account is another question. Again as I said above Spain is the only country I know in the EU that has this practice. It is illegal for public bodies to do it...but I am nit going to be the one to challenge the Agencia Tributaria and take an action against them.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/31 ... ect-debits


Re Understanding the exchange rate and how it works and how they make money. Even that .881 you see on Yahoo is not the full exchange rate which will actually be to five decimal places....0.88125 so there is a tiny margin for them (about 2-300 gbp for every million they convert) They will convert hundreds of millions per day for all the customers so all those tiny bits add up. Also every time you use the card in a shop to buy stuff the retailer sells it to you for 100. The retailer receives about 98.5 from card issuer Revolut. Card issuer pays visa or MasterCard 0.5 and keeps 1 for themselves.

They don't charge transfer fees as their is no cost it is all automated and links via computer so no manual intervention like years ago. The banks just perpetuate with transfer fees because they can get away with it.

The banks have been doing this since the 70's and making lots of money by charging much more for the above services. However they had expensive branch networks to run. Now new companies like Revolut can afford to charge less as their expenses are much much less.

[1bassleft]

Reading around on Revolut, (none of this worries me - I just want to load on, say, €50 and buy some 'phone data etc online pretty much immediately) but Revolut's not making money and is unlikely to if it just attracts users like me. Premium users' monthly charges would help but they're really hoping that people choking birdlife with their air miles will find Revolut so useful that they'd put their salary in there and use it as the main a/c (which is where the money's made). There are such people - I came across a forum of posts jawing over GlobCoin/Curve/Revolut et al and which one they use to top up their Bahts while racking up reward points to offset 1% commission etc. I only glanced, and one or more of these (not necessarily Revolut) might well run out of investment before the move into profitability but ring-fencing client's money is commonplace - if not FSCS protection.

Back to your other point, Paddy, that's what almost stunned me with my Correos website experience. I could (just) shrug off a Barcelona breaker or even a national find-your-used-part website going when presented with my Visa details (the credit card is a US-based multinational), less so with Simyo. I took it as read that the Correos prepaid would take any Visa/MC - they even blah about how useful it would be for travellers and holiday makers (they have a specially designed Santiago peregrino card that I nearly - but luckily didn't - recommend that my eldest brother get one when he yomps past some isolated post office). Unstocked, impossible to purchase or reload with a non-ES card; pretty limited market and - as you say - seems a bit skewed from Free Movement principles.

EDIT: I could, of course, be doing something dead flat wrong. I don't like to immediately tut and assume everything's powered by donkeys. I'd love to know what the mistake is, though. Pretty straightforward boxes to fill in.