Good grief! Rousted out of the sack at 6:30 ayem by the bulk trash pickup, flashing their lights into the bedroom. I thought it was the Fire Department! Grr…I’d planned to sleep in for a while today, after working myself stupid yesterday on a horrifically mind-numbing project.
{Ugh!} Speaking of bulk trash, what do we have here but an e-mail from the sidekick reporting that our brilliant author’s 87 gerjillion ditzy boxed pullouts disappeared from the file I sent her!? How many more hours am I going to have to spend on this garbage?
Where was I? Yesterday, comes in the snail-mail a notice from Sears saying its credit-card issuer, Citibank, has made “some changes.” I’ll bet, think I. Actually, I expected the “change” would be to cancel the account, which I opened only to get the benefit of a 12-month no-interest scam on some appliances and have never used since.
No. They’re writing mostly to say they’re upping the already usurious interest rate another couple of points.
Interest on this card, in the wacko free-for-all age of the unregulated market, can go as high as (hang onto your hat) 29.9 percent! For heaven’s sake. And this is on a card for Sears, a joint commonly patronized by folks who never spend their time swimming in money. Is that or is that not the most rapacious thing you ever heard?
Over at Consumerism Commentary, Flexo has a discussion going about the merits of debit cards vs. credit cards. I’ve never used a debit card, partly because I have enough numbers to memorize, thank you, without yet another PIN, but mostly because I think they’re dangerous. If someone steals it, he can not only empty your checking account, he can drain it to the bottom of your check-cashing credit line. In my case, that’s $3,000 plus whatever cash is in the account at the time.
I realize they’ve changed the law since these things first came out, so that you do have some protection from rip-off artists. But the fact remains that you may not realize what’s happening until the account is already bouncing EFTs. So even if the bank reimburses you for the stolen money, you still are faced with the enormous hassle trying to explain to all your creditors that you’re not, no indeed not, a deadbeat. Your credit could be damaged, and who has time to run through every punch-a-button maze for every faceless corporation with which we all have the pleasure of doing business? That’s a nightmare scenario that I’ve preferred to avoid.
A credit card—providing you pay it off on time—has many advantages. First, most credit card issuers back you up to some degree in a dispute with a merchant. Second, many credit card issuers provide insurance for products that are lost, damaged, or stolen shortly after the purchase. Third, many credit cards give you kickbacks in the form of cash or “rewards.” And finally, you make only one transaction a month in your checking account, rather than a score of them. This allows you to keep your money in a money market account, which earns a sou or so more in interest than a checking account does.
There is, as many PF bloggers note, the risk that you’ll spend more money when you’re waving a card around than when you’re forking over cold, hard cash. Personally, I have the opposite experience. Cash disappears out of my purse like water flowing through a pipe. Put $100 in my hand in the morning, and by evening it will be gone and, more to the point, I’ll have no idea where it went!A credit card statement gives me a paper trail, so at least I know where I diddled away the money.
And as a practical matter, I don’t diddle it away with a credit card. I budget a specific amount each month that can be charged to the credit card. The credit union automatically transfers that amount out of my paycheck into a money market checking account, from which I pay credit-card bills. Using an Excel spreadsheet, I enter each transaction as a debit against the budgeted amount, so that at any given time I know exactly how much remains to spend. I also know when I’ve spent it all, and so I know when to stop charging stuff.
This works effectively to keep me from spending more than I have.
Recently, however, American Express, which issues the card I use most, changed the closing date on a billing cycle. I dodged an overcharge only because I was ill and so didn’t make it out to buy groceries on the extra day that appeared in that cycle.
Needless to say, I was less than pleased. Because I was running pretty tight on the budget, had I bought the groceries I needed that day, I would have had to raid savings to pay last month’s bill.
It occurred to me that I could get around this problem by purchasing cash cards at Costco and Safeway (which collect most of my money) in the amount that I normally spend at those emporiums each month. This would set my budget in stone: run out of cash on a card, quit buying. It would moot any cute little changes designed to trip up credit-card users. But if I charged them on my AMEX card, I’d still get a bit of a kickback (not as much, because the Costco gasoline purchases get a very nice kickback, but something). It would also mean that if I had not used the entire balance on such a card, that much more would be available to spend the following month.
Let us ruminate…
If indeed I have not spent a month’s alloted budget at Safeway, so that I have, say, $150 left over at the end of a budget cycle, then the only place I can spend that money is at Safeway. Wouldn’t I rather have that money in the money market account, where it’s earning a little interest and where I can spend anywhere? While it’s true that the next paycheck puts another $150 spendable dollars in there, if the leftover cash remains in my account, the account contains 300 interest-bearing dollars rather than only 150 of the same.
And if a debit card is risky, how much riskier is a cash card? Anyone can use it, and as far as I can see, there’s no protection at all if you lose it or if it’s stolen. With a debit card you have a hassle. With a cash card, the money is already spent (effectively), and it’s as stealable as cash itself. Bad.
Costco’s cash card can be used to buy gasoline as well as food and household products. Costco will not take cash or checks at its gas pumps, which consistently underprice all other gas stations: you have to use an AMEX or a Costco card. If AMEX continues to close its billing cycle on unpredictable days, a cash card in the amount of $50 or so would allow me to buy gas near the end of a cycle without worrying about whether I would overrun my budget. While gas prices are low, it would even leave enough to buy a day’s worth of groceries. The theft of an entire month’s food budget would of course be a disaster, but fifty bucks wouldn’t break the bank.
It would be convenient to have a cash card to buy food and gas if, as happened a few months ago, the AMEX card mysteriously quits working. On the other hand…cash would serve the same purpose and need not be carried around in a wallet, where it’s infinitely vulnerable to diddling way, theft, or loss. It probably would be better to stash a hundred bucks in a file folder and use it as a small emergency fund.
Overall, then, pretty clearly a cash card has no advantage over a debit card and no advantage over cash. For those of us who need to see actual dollars in order to keep a grip on them, a cash card poses the same budget-busting risk as a credit card. In stop-loss terms.the debit card has only a slight advantage over cash should you lose it or have it stolen from you.
IMHO, the credit card has got it all over either a debit card or cash, assuming you can exercise a modicum of self-discipline. It’s safer, it lets you see where you’ve spent your money, and it gives you a kickback.
So… In the past I’ve made the day before and the day of the AMEX billing cycle end date “no-buy” days, to be sure all payments clear on the statement I’ve budgeted for. Now I’ll also refrain from spending on the day after the billing cycle is supposed to end. That should obviate any repercussions from this new “gotcha.”
This evening we had a close encounter with a pair of those eyes. We were ambling up the backside of our block, taking in the balmy evening air, when who should come flying across the perpendicular street but a fine, muscular young coyote!
The coyote was so focused on whatever it was chasing (cat?) or whatever it was running from (human?) that I don’t think it noticed us. Nevertheless, I picked up the Corgi and carried her the half-block back to our house. Tomorrow: remember to bring the pit-bull shilelagh! Gotta quit leaving that thing at home.
