Vietnam forum

It's probably not a huge difference, but nearly everyone, including me, seems to prefer to leave the money in your home bank and just withdraw it from ATMs once in the country. Yes, you do get dinged with a service charge from both banks in the transaction, but you at least get the official exchange rate, which is several percent better than you get from a money changer, and many of those also have service charges attached.

One of the keys for ATMs in Vietnam is that almost all of them only allow a withdrawal of 2 million dong at a time, or in a day. That's only about US$100, so with $5 in service fees that adds up a bit. But, weirdly enough, at the branches of ANZ Bank, the ATMs let you take out up to 10 million at a time (or maybe more) as long as that's within your bank's daily limit. Their service fee is slightly higher, but obviously if you only need to pull out money so infrequently, as a percentage it ends up being very low. There are a few ANZ branches in Hanoi and also in Saigon, but not in most smaller cities.

By the way, in case you are worried about being robbed while carrying around so much cash, it's not really a common problem in Vietnam. Especially in Hanoi people will often try to drastically overcharge you for some things, but pickpocketing or mugging seems to be extremely rare. Take the usual precautions though.

Hi, just want to warn you that coins in general aren't welcome because apparently banks only exchange notes. We once met a person wanting to exchange euro coins because she said the bank didn't exchange them. It didn't seam a scheme as she was asking for a lower rate. (eventually we didn't change as we were low in cash)

Right!