Loading Study Abroad Budget…
A term overseas costed in both currencies at a rate you type in. No rate is fetched here, none is stored, and nothing on this page is current: the answer is exactly as up to date as the number you enter below.
Everything marked as monthly below is multiplied by this.
How many HOST one HOME buys. Write down where you got it and when.
How much worse than that rate you actually get. Leave blank to price at the rate itself.
These are the lines the exchange rate cannot touch. Keeping them separate stops a rate move from appearing to change the price of a flight you already bought.
Enter how many months the term abroad runs, above zero.
A rate is a fact about one moment, and a term is several months long. Anything sent over there will be converted on the day it is sent, at whatever rate exists then, less whatever the bank takes that day. This page cannot know any of that, so treat the total as the cost of the plan at one stated rate rather than as the cost of the term.
Transfer charges, cash withdrawal fees and the spread on a card are not modelled separately. Fold them into the margin above if you know roughly what they come to, or add them as a line paid over there. Left out, they make the total optimistic rather than wrong.
Every tool on this site runs entirely in your browser and calls nothing outside it. There is no server request behind this page, no rate feed, and nothing stored about what you type. That is a privacy commitment first, but it also happens to be the honest engineering choice here: a rate written into a file is wrong within days and wrong silently, and a rate fetched once and cached is a number pretending to be current.
So the rate is an input, sitting beside the costs rather than above them. Whatever you enter, write down where it came from and what day it was true on. The total that comes back is the cost of this plan at that rate, which is a smaller and more defensible claim than the cost of your term abroad.
Rent, groceries, a travel pass, the deposit on a room and any fee billed by the host institution are all spent in the local currency, and every one of them moves when the rate moves. Flights bought at home, insurance arranged before departure and any fee still owed to your own university are not: they were priced in the money you already hold and no exchange rate can revise them.
Keeping the two apart stops a currency swing from appearing to change the price of a ticket already sitting in your inbox. It also produces a figure worth more than the total — the share of the whole bill actually exposed to the rate. A term where most of the spending is rent abroad is a very different exposure from one where the flights and tuition dominate, and the same movement in the rate matters far more in the first case.
A published mid-market rate is where two banks meet. It is not what a card gives you at a supermarket till, what an app charges to move money on a Sunday, or what a cash machine offers when it helpfully suggests billing you in your own currency. The margin field exists to hold that difference: enter how much worse than the quoted rate you actually receive, and everything is converted at the worse figure instead.
Transfer charges and withdrawal fees are not modelled as separate lines. Fold them into the margin if you have a sense of their size, or add them as one more thing paid locally. Left out entirely they do not make the total wrong so much as optimistic, which over several months is the same problem arriving slowly.
The sensitivity rows apply shifts of five and ten per cent to the number you typed. They are arithmetic on your own input and not a forecast — nothing here has an opinion about where any currency is going. What they show is the shape of the exposure: the rent over there does not change when the rate does, so every one of those rows is a statement about how much you have to send from home.
Read them as a stress test. If a ten per cent move is uncomfortable, the plan is thinner than it looks, and the fix is a larger buffer rather than a better rate. Money will be converted on many different days across a term, each at whatever the rate happens to be, and no single figure entered in August can describe all of them.
It is how many units of the currency you will spend that one unit of the currency you hold will buy. The hint under the box restates that using the two codes you entered, so it reads back in your own currencies rather than in the abstract.
Any source you trust and can date: a bank, a card provider, or the rate a transfer service actually quotes you rather than the one it advertises. The last of those is usually closest to reality, because it already has the provider margin folded into it.
Not in one pass, since it prices a single term at a single rate. Run it twice and keep both totals in your home currency, which is the only unit the two destinations share and therefore the only fair basis for setting one against the other.
Because a prefilled rent or food figure would be this site making a claim about what living somewhere costs, and it holds no such figures for anywhere. Every box waits for a number you have actually looked up for the city you are going to.