Currency Cheat Sheet

Building The Card

1. Choose your home currency and the currency of the place you are visiting.
2. The live mid-market rate loads automatically; override it with the rate your bank actually charges if you want realistic numbers.
3. Enter the amounts you care about, such as coffee money, taxi fares, and dinner budgets.
4. Generate the card, then print it or save it as a PDF and keep it in your wallet or on your phone.

The Two Columns

The left column answers "what does my money buy" and the right column answers "what did that price tag just cost me". The reverse amounts are rounded to natural values in the destination currency, so they match the numbers you actually see on menus and price tags rather than awkward conversions of round home-currency amounts.

The Mental Math Rule

Nobody does long division at a market stall. The card finds the nearest easy multiplier to the real rate and tells you how far off it is. For example, a rate of 1.09 becomes "multiply by 1, then add 9%", and a rate of 148 becomes "multiply by 150, then subtract 1%". Getting within a few percent in one second beats being exact in thirty.

Rates And Reality

• Live rates are mid-market rates; they are the midpoint between buy and sell prices.
• Your card issuer typically adds 1 to 3%, and airport kiosks can take 10% or more.
• For a card that matches what you really pay, take your rate from a recent statement and put it in the manual override.
• If the live rate cannot be reached, a stored fallback rate is used and the card is marked accordingly; rates drift, so refresh before you travel.

Privacy

Everything is generated in your browser. The only network request is the exchange rate lookup, and your amounts, notes, and preferences never leave your device.

You can embed this util on your own site as a widget. Adding ?embed=1 to the URL loads a compact version with just the tool itself; no header, menu, or documentation. Paste this snippet into your HTML:

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