would this work?

It is legal because when you go on holiday you convert your currency to foreign money then when you come back you change it again to local currency. it is legal as you are not mmoney laundering. As for the fees if you actually use some places where you buy the foreign currency they offer to convert it back free when you come back off holiday so it does not always include a fee.

I just had to comment on your response to this discussion because I'm very impressed as to how knowledgable you are on this subject.

I have done a lot of reading, mostly in order to advise others against throwing their money away!

Gold is certainly one of the commodities which is always likely to more than hold its value (until chemists discover how to fabricate atoms rather than just molecules). That is why currency used to be based on it (as well as being actually made of it). The economic reasons for most currency being no longer based on any kind of actual physical reserve such as gold are very complex but the fact is that 'money' is now regulated by some very airy-fairy concepts, many of which may not have any reality at all. Most people do not have any idea what money REALLY is. They may think about it in terms of how much they are paid and how much of that monthly paycheck has to go towards living expenses and so on and that, indeed, is all that is really relevant to them. If you are running a business, however, money is quite a different thing. For a business, it isn't how much you have (or receive each month) that matters so much as how fast money is flowing through the company - something called cash flow and turnover. The confusion arises because both are measured or calculated in the same units - dollars, pounds, rupees or whatever. To illustrate it somewhat, think of the ways we can talk about a car. We may boast that it "can do 120 [mph]" or that it can "do 0 to 60 in 5 seconds" but that doesn't tell us anything about how long it will take to get from A to B (or how much it will cost in gas, of course). *** lecture over *** I believe, like you, that, in the not too distant future, we shall not be handling paper or coins. Already we are beginning to receive funny looks from certain places when we pull a wad of notes out of our pockets! Many places deal only with plastic and I can see this going even further so that everyone will be carrying a 'Universal Communication Device' with them - it might even be surgically inserted - which will do everything including calling or sending messages to friends, remembering calendars and shopping lists, paying for goods and receiving payments, identifying you when you vote in elections, allowing you into different countries (border/passport control) and many, many other functions.