Revolut vs. Wise - 1 year later (Review)

hello everybody in today's video i want to talk about revolut and transferwise and if you travel regularly to countries that have a different currency than yours then most likely you already heard of those services and as you can see i own both cards i hope you recognized how professionally i censored my data down here but i think after using both of them for a year and traveling to different countries all over the world i think i'm in a very good position to tell you if i like them what i like what i don't like what

they are and if there is one i prefer i personally am on the free account on both of them i purchased the cards you can get them for a very small one-time fee plus shipping so when you look at it for the first time both revolut and wise may seem quite similar because both of them are banks they give you a european bank account with both of them you can hold money in different accounts in different currencies and the feature that i personally use most of the time is when i travel worldwide with them i

pay with them because my bank head home first off they charge me very high fees and second they use an exchange rate that's very bad for me but revolut and wise they just use the inter bank exchange account which is much more cheaper most of the time there is not even any fees when i pay with them worldwide with both of them i can save a lot of money while traveling and the only downside well let's not call it a downside it's more like a neutral is that you actually have to have to have the

money on the account to be able to pay with it so if there's no money there i cannot use them but it's not that difficult to put money on them but we will talk a little bit more about that later when we come to the pros and cons with both services you can also cash some money worldwide for free well for free is only up to a certain amount i never barely ever cash any money so this limit is never something that really affects me there's a few fees that they charge not much when you

transfer money via bank transfer obviously there's some charges but they are very transparent about that so before you make your transfer you already see how much they will charge you and it's a a lot a lot cheaper than what my banks at home would charge me and also with revolut for example when you pay with the card on the weekends they charge a small fee during the week is free on the weekends you have to pay but really with all those fees they are very transparent and they're much cheaper than what i would pay with

my bank back home in austria so now let's talk a little bit more about revolut first revolut is a little bit more taylor towards travelers and they have a nice app which has very functional features for example you can very easily add money onto revolut with an existing card so for example i can use my bank card from austria to quickly transfer some money onto revolut and then it's done in a second i can i can use this card again they also have very nice features like my husband also has one of those revolute cards

so just like sending messages on whatsapp you can send money back and forth you can split bills directly in the app you can make a vault which is like a savings account that everybody can get money in and out of and all those things so revolut has a few very nice features and also when you go into the paid accounts they have some extras like you can have travel insurance with them you can have airport launch passes and all those kinds of things and another thing i really really like about revolut is that they give

you virtual cards so whenever i want to buy something online and it's a little bit dodgy place or a hotel insists that i have to give them my credit card details over the phone which i usually would never do i can just make a virtual card i make it for the use of one time i use it when it's done it's done so nobody can access my data nobody can access my things what does not excite me that much about revolut is that i have to pay fees for paying with it on the weekend again

it's not that high as i would usually pay with my card but nonetheless they are still there also the app with all their extra things like crypto and all those things can get a little bit cluttered so it's sometimes difficult to see what's really happening we also ran into problem here in brazil it seems like they don't work with one provider so every time we try to use the card with their machines it just does not work and also uber brazil over the app always refuses these cards so at first it goes through then it

gets rejected i don't know so i just started using this card with apple pay and pay in uber with apple pay and then it goes through it does not work everywhere so i would say it probably one out of 25 payments does not work and another thing that revolut cannot do is for example wire some money to brazil so we are here right now when we go to the hotel many times they ask for a prepayment and usually i would just wire it and to save cost yeah but revolut does not wire to brazil which

is a little bit annoying which brings me to wise with them it's no problem so if i whenever i need to wire some money to brazil i just use their theme which is basically for me the big benefit of having this wise card as well they don't have that many features for travelers it's just this is actually more like an international business account where you can hold different currencies and also the app is much more structured like a regular banking app but one of the downsides is that it's not that easy to put money on

this card usually you just have to wire it there it's not like with this two-click thing with the from another card that we have on revolut so it's a little bit more complicated and also all those features that we use a lot to send money between my husband and me back and forth and split bills is not available on cards like this so do i have a favorite between those two actually my answer may be no because to be honest both of them have their strengths and i am on the free account on both of

them so it really does not hurt me to have both of them and i use each of them according to their strengths so as you may have already guessed my revolute card i use for day in day out all the payments on the go restaurants hotels groceries all those things i pay with this card also with the money i share with my husband we sent back and forth all the shared bills goes on this one and this one the wise card i mainly used to make international transfers so both of them in my opinion are

extremely useful i wish there was one card that would combine all the pros into one service but to be honest since both of them are free services it's complaining on a very high level one more thing i really like about revolut is the vote system so this savings account because with one click i can transfer money there and transfer it back into my account and for me this is another layer of security because i just keep a minimum amount of money available on the card when i'm paying when i'm out and about so just in

case something bad happens and something hijacks my card there's nothing there for them to spend but on the same time with one click in my app wherever i am i can put money there if i need it and i have it and another benefit of having both of them for some people could be that obviously the limit for free cash is doubled because you get i don't know 400 here 400 there so it's double the amount of money per month if that is something that you need so even though both of them have their downsides

and they don't work 100 reliably all the time i'm very happy to have them both i really take them with me on every single trip but would i travel with them as my only cards no definitely not i personally feel much safer bringing my austrian credit card with me just in case everything goes wrong and even though i may only need my european card like once every 100 payments at that payment i'm glad that i have it so i have one last tip for you i almost forgot because of the nice exchange rates these cards

are also extremely extremely useful to buy software products online well also other things online but especially with software the european apple store charges a lot more for example than the american one so what i do all the time is instead of buying my software subscriptions over the app store is that i go directly to the website of the app programmers and i look if they have a gift card just last week something that would have cost me 55 euros paying over the app store i ended up paying 35 euros thanks to the gift card and

the good exchange rate and the good price in dollars so yeah this is about it i hope you enjoyed this video if you have any tips for me please let me know if you want to know more about minimalist traveling and my trips and everything i will link the playlist right here and other than that thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye