Money is the least romantic part of cruising and one of the most expensive to get wrong. A British or American boater spending a season in France is constantly converting one currency into euros, and every conversion is a chance for a bank to skim a slice. Get your money setup right before you leave and the skimming nearly stops. Get it wrong and you will donate a few hundred euros to the financial system over a summer without ever noticing the leak.
I have run a boat through several French seasons on a non-euro income, made every mistake, and settled on a setup that keeps the spread tight. Here it is.
The Core Problem
You earn and bank in pounds or dollars. You spend in euros. Somewhere between the two, money gets converted, and the question is only who does the converting and at what rate. Your high-street bank will do it badly, at a marked-up rate with a foreign-transaction fee on top, typically 2 to 3 percent all in. A specialist multi-currency provider will do it at close to the interbank (mid-market) rate with a tiny, transparent fee. The difference does not sound like much per transaction. Across a season of berths, fuel, yard bills, and provisioning, it compounds into real money.
The goal is simple: convert in big, deliberate chunks at a good rate, hold euros, and spend from the euro balance so day-to-day card use involves no conversion at all.
The Multi-Currency Card Is the Foundation
A Wise or Revolut account is the single most useful piece of money kit for a visiting cruiser. Both let you hold a euro balance and spend from it. Wise applies the mid-market exchange rate even at weekends, which matters because that is exactly when you tend to fuel up and eat out. Revolut's Standard plan adds a 1 percent surcharge on foreign-currency conversion at weekends, so if you use Revolut, do your conversions on a weekday and spend the held euros at the weekend.
Watch the ATM small print. Wise's free ATM withdrawal allowance is modest, around 250 euros a month before fees on the standard card, and Revolut's Standard plan caps free withdrawals at roughly 200 euros or five withdrawals a month, after which a 2 percent fee (or 1 euro minimum) applies. For a cruiser who needs occasional cash for fuel pumps and small ports, those allowances are usually enough if you withdraw in sensible lumps rather than dribs and drabs.
The workflow I use: hold euros on the card, top up by converting a chunk of home currency when the rate looks reasonable, spend from the euro balance for everything, and keep a normal home-bank card as a backup in case a terminal rejects the app card. The day-to-day side of that, including which French payment situations need cash, is covered in paying for berths and services with cards versus cash.
A word on redundancy, because a boat is a bad place to discover your only card has been frozen. App-based providers are quick to lock an account when they see unusual activity, and a foreign cruiser fuelling in three countries in a week looks exactly like fraud to an algorithm. I carry two separate multi-currency cards on different accounts, plus a mainstream home-bank card, and I keep the apps that unlock them downloaded and logged in. The day Revolut decided my movements were suspicious and froze the card at a fuel berth in the Gulf of Morbihan, the backup card paid for the diesel and I sorted the freeze over coffee. One card is not a plan. Two is the minimum, three is comfortable.
Cash, And How Much
France is heavily cashless, but cash still saves the day at automated fuel pumps that reject foreign cards, at small fishing harbours, and at out-of-hours marina night boxes. My rule is to keep 50 to 100 euros aboard at all times: enough for a tank of diesel plus a night's berth. Withdraw it from a bank-branded ATM rather than the standalone machines in tourist spots, which often impose their own fee and a dreadful rate. And when any ATM or card terminal offers to charge you "in your home currency", always decline and choose euros. That dynamic currency conversion is a guaranteed loss, every single time.
Paying a French Yard or Big Bill
Card limits make a multi-currency card useless for a 20,000 euro refit invoice. For large payments you need a transfer, and this is where a service like Wise earns its keep. A direct euro transfer from a multi-currency account to a French yard's IBAN settles at the mid-market rate for a fee of a fraction of a percent, against the 2 to 4 percent your home bank would quietly take on an international wire.
Plan these transfers. Convert when the rate is favourable, hold the euros, and pay the yard from the euro balance so the bill itself involves no conversion. On a serious refit the saving versus a high-street international transfer can run to hundreds of euros. The VAT on that same yard work is a separate and larger question, and worth understanding before you commit, which I cover in VAT on boat repairs and refit in France. Currency and tax are two distinct slices of the same invoice, and you want both right.
The Exchange-Rate Trap on Importing
If you are not just visiting but importing or buying a boat in France, currency timing stops being a budget nicety and becomes a five-figure decision. Customs value, duty, and VAT are all fixed in euros on the day of import, so the rate on that day moves your tax bill. A British buyer importing a 150,000 euro boat with the pound weak against the euro can pay thousands more in sterling terms than one who timed it on a strong pound. The mechanics of how those charges stack, and why the euro figure is what matters, are worked through in import duty on a boat brought to France with examples. If a big euro purchase is coming, watch the rate the way you watch a forecast, and consider locking a rate in advance for the bulk of the sum.
A Setup You Can Copy
Strip it back and a season-ready money kit looks like this:
- A multi-currency account (Wise or Revolut) holding euros, used as the everyday card.
- A home-bank card kept as backup for terminals that reject the app card.
- 50 to 100 euros cash aboard for pumps, small ports, and night boxes.
- A habit of converting in deliberate chunks at a good rate, never on the fly.
- Always choosing euros, never your home currency, when a machine asks.
- Mid-market transfers for any bill too big for a card, planned around the rate.
A note for non-EU cruisers on the way out. If you have bought things in France that you are taking outside the EU, you may be able to reclaim the VAT through the tourist refund scheme, which is a separate currency-and-tax question from everyday spending. It applies to goods, not services, and not to the boat herself, but on a large chandlery purchase it can be worth the paperwork. That sits alongside the broader proof-of-status and VAT questions a non-EU boat carries, and it is the kind of thing to research before you leave rather than at the airport on the way home.
None of it is complicated. It is one afternoon of setup before you cross, and it stops the slow drain that turns a tidy cruising budget into a leaky one. The savings sit alongside the larger costs in the annual running costs of a boat in France, and unlike the berth fees and the fuel price, the money you lose to bad exchange rates is entirely within your control. Plug that leak first.
