Don't make visa runs. You're not doing anything except putting yourself in the bull's eye of immigrations. There's a whole thread with the participation a respected Argentine immigration and citizenship attorney (bajo cero) that spells out why in detail.
If you need money from outside the country, there are options (Xoom being the easiest) to get cash from your foreign bank account, converted into pesos at a great rate. In the private cuevas you can get dollars, euros, etc on receipt of your transfer. It's more difficult to find the contacts when you get away from Xoom and into the private cuevas, but well worth it because there effectively are no limits on what you can send (there are, but most people don't need to send $100K in a month...).
As to the credit card thing - I didn't have time to read more than the article posted, which didn't offer too much in the way of explanation, other than to say it's not a restriction of the user, but rather the credit card companies. Seems the same to me either way - it's going to impact the user.
One comment I have about international credit card purchases though, related to direct experience:
My wife and I recently drove to Paraguay and stayed there for about 10 days. While we were there, I mostly used my US credit card as the official rate is great and I didn't have to use so much cash. I could also pull out dollars at will from the ATMs (many of them, anyway) using my debit card.
My wife went to a kiosko there (called dispensas in Paraguay) at one point and bought a few things with her Argentine AMEX credit card issued through Santander Rio. The total bill was 21,000 guaranies, or about $4.75 USD.
Upon returning to BA, we received the bank statement from Santander Rio, which included the charges for the credit card to be paid off or rolled into the line of credit to be paid on a monthly basis in installment payments.
We saw the one charge made in Paraguay. It was listed in USD currency. My wife went to pay her balance for the credit card and found that she could not pay that one item with the rest. According to the clerk there (and I'm getting this through my wife - it's her first credit card and credit cards here are different in how they are approached than in the US so she may have some confusion about this and I can't help her from my previous experience - I need to go to the bank and find out if this all is real, what they told her), she could not pay that item with pesos because foreign charges are converted to dollars and must be paid in dollars.
She had a $5 bill left over from our trip in her wallet and she pulled it out to pay the amount. She was then informed that the minimum dollar payment/deposit allowed is $50 USD!
I don't know what in all of that is official policy and what is Santander Rio's.
So, the article mentions that foreign charges are converted (but they don't explicitly say to the peso) at the official rate. Somehow, through all those conversions, we ended up with a straight conversion from guaranies to dollars at the direct guarani to dollar rate with no loss, even of a few cents, by my calculation.
Strange, all of it...
If you need money from outside the country, there are options (Xoom being the easiest) to get cash from your foreign bank account, converted into pesos at a great rate. In the private cuevas you can get dollars, euros, etc on receipt of your transfer. It's more difficult to find the contacts when you get away from Xoom and into the private cuevas, but well worth it because there effectively are no limits on what you can send (there are, but most people don't need to send $100K in a month...).
As to the credit card thing - I didn't have time to read more than the article posted, which didn't offer too much in the way of explanation, other than to say it's not a restriction of the user, but rather the credit card companies. Seems the same to me either way - it's going to impact the user.
One comment I have about international credit card purchases though, related to direct experience:
My wife and I recently drove to Paraguay and stayed there for about 10 days. While we were there, I mostly used my US credit card as the official rate is great and I didn't have to use so much cash. I could also pull out dollars at will from the ATMs (many of them, anyway) using my debit card.
My wife went to a kiosko there (called dispensas in Paraguay) at one point and bought a few things with her Argentine AMEX credit card issued through Santander Rio. The total bill was 21,000 guaranies, or about $4.75 USD.
Upon returning to BA, we received the bank statement from Santander Rio, which included the charges for the credit card to be paid off or rolled into the line of credit to be paid on a monthly basis in installment payments.
We saw the one charge made in Paraguay. It was listed in USD currency. My wife went to pay her balance for the credit card and found that she could not pay that one item with the rest. According to the clerk there (and I'm getting this through my wife - it's her first credit card and credit cards here are different in how they are approached than in the US so she may have some confusion about this and I can't help her from my previous experience - I need to go to the bank and find out if this all is real, what they told her), she could not pay that item with pesos because foreign charges are converted to dollars and must be paid in dollars.
She had a $5 bill left over from our trip in her wallet and she pulled it out to pay the amount. She was then informed that the minimum dollar payment/deposit allowed is $50 USD!
I don't know what in all of that is official policy and what is Santander Rio's.
So, the article mentions that foreign charges are converted (but they don't explicitly say to the peso) at the official rate. Somehow, through all those conversions, we ended up with a straight conversion from guaranies to dollars at the direct guarani to dollar rate with no loss, even of a few cents, by my calculation.
Strange, all of it...
