No Debt Plan hosts the 165th Carnival of Personal Finance today. Looking forward to the start of this fall’s college football season, he’s running for a touchdown with this enormous and lively carnival. Funny’s guest poster Miranda Marquit made the line-up with her article on keeping debt under control while attending college.
NDP is giving away $50 Amazon gift cards to those who subscribe to his site, BTW. Check out his offer at the carnival, and while you’re there read some of the many good entries he features. My Two Dollars has a nice rumination on some of the things (other than $$) that make an employee happy. An extremely interesting article appears at a site called Really Better Real Estate, where Realtor Joe Manausa challenges the worth of three widely held real estate statistics. Not the Jet Set describes what happened when a perp got ahold of his wife’s debit card number–good reason to use credit cards. Though their bank caught on quickly and they did not have to pay for the charges, with a debit card a criminal can clean out your account and you can end up eating the loss.
Thanks for the link!
BTW – I don’t understand your comments. How is it a good reason to use a credit card? They caught the problem *before* any charges hit our account, and it a way that I could only describe as ‘best-in-class’ – especially for a small regional bank.
Also, there is this common misconception that debit cards some how leave you vulnerable to a criminal ‘cleaning out your account’ as if the bank just throws your money at them. Debit cards – likely for this purpose alone – have what’s called a daily limit. I suppose if your balance is below that threshold, then they technically could. But that is simply not the case across the board. Also, Visa and MC both extend the same zero-liability policy as credit cards to debit.
So fear not – still no reason to carry a credit card.
cheers
I’m probably still encased in prehistoric amber. Years ago, a lawyer advised me never to use a debit card, claiming exactly what you say: that if a fraudulent debit made on one of those cards goes unnoticed for a fairly short time, you can be responsible for it, and that people not only have lost all the cash in their accounts but have had all their check bouncing protection reserve drain down. So they not only lost their money, they had to pay the bank back for the overdraft loan.
Admittedly, I have no evidence of this other than the “expert” testimony of an attorney, some years old. Possibly banks have changed their policy or the law has been changed to protect consumers.
If that’s the case, then the only advantage of a credit card would be the float. No, make that two advantages: if you have a cash-back or rewards card, you get a little kickback from the card issuer.