Over the years I’ve spent quite a few hours bending over credit card statements with a calculator trying to figure out the exact exchange rate and fee I was accessed for making an international purchase. It wasn’t always an easy task, especially in the days when credit card companies didn’t even disclose that a fee was being levied. These days, most credit card companies disclose that they are in fact charging a fee, but determining an exact fee and exchange rate can still be quite the task. Here are a few tips to solve the riddle.

Step 1) Locate the receipt for the item purchased and determine the total amount paid in the foreign currency.

Step 2) Find the total amount paid in U.S. dollars on your credit card statement.

Step 3) Determine the exchange rate on the day that you made the purchase. See this exchange rate resource to find links to check exchange rates.

Step 4) Take the amount of your original purchase multiplied by the correct exchange rate for the country that the purchase was made in.

Step 5) Subtract the number determined in step 2 by the number in step 4. This is the total fee paid for making the international purchase on your credit card. Divide this number by step 2 to determine the total percentage of the purchase was paid to fees.

Some credit card companies will provide the dollar amount paid in fees in a separate line on the credit card statement. If you take this fee total divided by U.S. dollar total listed on the statement you will usually get a nice round percentage fee. However, this does not tell you the actual exchange rate used to assess the fee. Credit card companies will tell you that the exchange rates vary from day to day and that they can’t tell you exactly what the exchange rate used will be for a particular purchase will be. This is true. The exchange rate that your credit card company uses to assess the fee is often NOT the same as the exchange rate found on one of the resources listed in step 2. Visa will tell you for example that the exchange rate used to convert your purchase depends on when the transaction is actually processed in their system and could take longer than a day to post. Theoretically, if the exchange rate fluctuates in your favor during that period some of the fee could be absorbed by the fluctuating rate. Alternatively, if the exchange rate moves against you, then you’ll pay slightly more. That said, the exchange rate listed in one of the resources above should be very close to the actual rate used by your credit card company to convert your purchase.