8 ms·

Majority of EU population. Even in US debit is more popular than credit in 18-25 age bracket.

by c2h5oh 8mo ago

xp84 8mo ago
(Frame of reference: US only) That's a shame, given 18-25 is just the age where a credit card skimmer or online card fraud causing a big fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back, could be devastating. This has happened to people in my family (likely from gas stations) but we only use credit cards except to pull cash from ATMs, so we only suffer a temporary dip in our available credit line while they investigate and do not have to pay the disputed charges in the meantime. I know people with terrible credit may have problems getting a credit card, and others may have trouble not treating a credit line as spendable beyond their means, but everyone else should keep the 'debit card' at home or at least confined to their wallet.
- thegrim000 8mo ago
  It's extremely common advice to not keep large sums of cash sitting in your checking account. With capital one (and others) you can just open a free savings account, keep the bulk in there (if you don't want to invest it instead), which earns an actual interest, and then there's never a "big" amount of vulnerable cash sitting in your checking account. There's free/instant transfers between savings and checking when you need to move more into your checking.
  - pants2 8mo ago
    Not a great solution to constantly have to top up your checking account with some amount between "I need this much to pay my bills" and "losing this amount would devastating" which for many people has quite some overlap
    - pitaj 8mo ago
      You can pay bills from your savings account with ACH in the US.
      - vel0city 8mo ago
        While Regulation D was lifted a few years ago, there are often still restrictions to the number of withdrawals one can do from a lot of savings accounts.
      - xp84 8mo ago
        Interesting perspective. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the pitch here would be: 1. Paycheck DD → straight to savings 2. "Spending money" for in-person transactions → transfer periodically to checking 3. Use debit card to spend from checking. That's an interesting idea. Actually what is intriguing to me is another angle: I'd still never consider spending with debit. But my problem is that it's essentially impossible to get an ATM card that isn't a debit card anymore, meaning if I want to be able to use an ATM, I have to carry this stupid card around that would be easy to use to drain my checking account. With your approach, if I can get a savings account that is not linked to a checking account, I could use that as my default place where I pay my rent and credit card bills from. But it's a big if, because a lot of savings accounts have limits on how many withdrawals they can have per month, probably a residue of that regulation that someone else said was recently repealed.
    - vel0city 8mo ago
      If most of your income comes from salary/wages, just have the paycheck first hit your normal checking account first and then have scheduled deposits from there into savings accounts someplace else. You generally have enough money in the account to cover your monthly stuff plus a bit of buffer, but have the pile of cash elsewhere in case something happens. This way you're not actively having to top off your normal spending account, but at the same time have a backstop in case that active account gets hit by fraud or whatever. I'd suggest protecting yourself even further and having those accounts be split across two different banks. This way if one of your bank credentials gets hacked or you have some issue with the bank you at least have a chance of still having an account with cash someplace else to cover the short term.
      - xp84 8mo ago
        Highly recommend this approach. My personal approach has been, for almost 20 years, to have one checking account as Schwab, and the other at a credit union. Schwab has superior offerings for most things, refunds all ATM fees worldwide, and is easy to get on the phone if I have any issue, and the credit union can handle those once-in-5-years (for me) kind of in-person situations like getting a cashier's check, or if I wanted $500 in $100 bills for a gift, etc.
- reaperducer 8mo ago
  fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back I've had this happen to me twice in about 25 years. Neither bank made me wait weeks. The most recent one (with a giant megabank) issued a provisional credit in under an hour. There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online. U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.
  - pc86 8mo ago
    They might, and it's good they do, but they're not legally required to in quite the same way that they are with credit cards. If someone pulls $10k out of your BofA account, they're completely within their rights to do basically nothing about it.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8mo ago
    The key with debit cards is the incentive misalignment. With credit, it’s the bank that loses out, not you. With debit, it’s you. Until the consequences are equaled by legislation, there’s no world where they get equal treatment by the bank
    - anonymars 8mo ago
      To add on to that: if someone fraudulently uses your credit card, it's the issuer's money that's now missing and they need to get it back. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card, it's your money that's now missing that you need to get back. Hopefully things don't start overdrawing your account in the meantime.
      - maest 8mo ago
        How come this is not a problem in Europe? Credit cards make same promises there, but usage is greatly diminished.
        hibikir 8mo ago
- tecleandor 8mo ago
  That's way less common in Europe. Most places are chip and pin or NFC and that limits skimming quite a lot.
  - BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
    Thankfully the US is very slowly catching up. We actually have NFC at most payment terminals already. Even better, our small town (pop. 100) gas station upgraded their pumps a while back, and they have NFC! Finally my normal fill-up location is skimmer-resistant. Or is it skimmer-proof?
    - consp 8mo ago
      > Or is it skimmer-proof? Put a reader with a shield on the pad and a new pad on top and a small terminal in somewhere out of sight. You won't know the difference. Requires infrastructure though so it is a bit more complicated and a lot more noticeable. Likely used the non-pin entry limit which is always reset after you payed a large amount and had to enter your pin. Not like the strip readers of olden days. Anecdote: We had a "chip charge" system where you put money in your card via a ATM like device and those sometimes had strange "extensions" in front of it which read your chip while you charged it and immediately took the money. People often don't know what too look for when it comes to skimming devices and with tech it may look like a strange but genuine device.
      - BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
        Wouldn't that only be able to steal money one time though? Whereas a traditional skimmer captures the card number, and can charge the card indefinitely until the card is reported stolen and replaced.
  - what 8mo ago
    How so? My card was skimmed and I had only tapped it in maybe a half dozen locations. Never swiped it or inserted it anywhere or used it online.
- silisili 8mo ago
  I wish I could scream this from the rooftops. People should keep their debit cards locked/frozen, and only use them to get money from ATMs when needed. All other spending should go onto credit cards, for numerous reasons that have been bought up throughout this thread.
  - stackskipton 8mo ago
    Most banks/CU will issue you ATM only card that cannot be used a credit card. Might require some wrangling with the bank.
    - rsingel 8mo ago
      These are increasingly harder to get, sadly. My credit union won't anymore. I have to keep a debit card locked
  - hvb2 8mo ago
    Stay on your own rooftop please. That is a very US only view. There's nothing wrong with debit cards being used. If I can shout one thing back up to your rooftop: Why on earth do your transactions cost 2 or 3 percent. For what? For basically verifying an RFID chip and adding a single entry to a ledger? Don't say you're getting it back with points or whatever because we all know that the credit card company won't be going broke so that cut is coming from somewhere. And in the end that's always the consumer
    - silisili 8mo ago
      Of course it's a US view. It's a US site and the OP even prefaced it as such. Does every reply need to do the same? Retailers(in the US) typically eat the cost. Some industries(in the US), like gun shops, are up front about charging more for credit card payments. Most companies(in the US) just see it as cost of doing business. Points have next to nothing to do with why you should always use credit cards(in the US). There are legal consumer protection reasons. The points are just an optional perk.
- aprilthird2021 8mo ago
  Most 18-22 year olds are living alone for the first time and have just set up their first bank account and are spending all their time focused on studies and trying to get an internship, so they aren't focused on the difference between credit card and debit card, plus they don't spend a lot out anyways
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
  In the rest of the world (not the US), "credit card" == "debit card without zero overdraft limit".
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  Really, this is a non-existing problem in most places outside the US. Are you still using magnetic stripes?????
  - lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    It's a non existent problem in the US, too. The internet likes to blow things out of proportion, but not only are pretty much all payments made with tap to pay for many years now, even when it was magnetic strip, the incidence rate was miniscule.
    - vel0city 8mo ago
      > It's a non existent problem in the US Dead wrong. Its still a big problem in the US. https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-research-briefings/how-do-consumers-fraud-experiences-vary-with-their-financial-vulnerability/ https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-resea... > In 2023, 21 percent of U.S. consumers experienced financial fraud: 17 percent of all consumers (or 18 percent of consumers who own credit cards) experienced credit card fraud, and 8 percent of all consumers experienced non-credit card fraud (with some consumers experiencing both types of fraud). Sure, we've now moved to do tap to pay and chipped cards for a lot of transactions. However, this is useless for online orders which just requires knowledge of the magic numbers which all are helpfully printed on the face of the card you hand to people, tell over the phone, or type into websites. We need to move towards actually secure online payment systems.
      - xp84 8mo ago
        We are moving towards it... if every site accepted both Apple Pay and Google Pay we'd be there. If we got there, you could make the case that we ought to all be able to file all the numbers off of our cards and never need to give them to anyone. But the problem is that even with 99% adoption, those secrets still have to be printed on the cards and used some percentage of the time to support the laggards -- and it only takes one hack or phish to defraud you.
- jms703 8mo ago
  Yes, in the US, if you are disciplined to not spend beyond your means, credit cards are much safer to use than debit. Sadly, the last I checked, financial discipline is not taught in our public schools.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

Majority of EU population. Even in US debit is more popular than credit in 18-25 age bracket.

by c2h5oh 8mo ago

Majority of EU population. Even in US debit is more popular than credit in 18-25 age bracket.

xp84 8mo ago

(Frame of reference: US only) That's a shame, given 18-25 is just the age where a credit card skimmer or online card fraud causing a big fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back, could be devastating. This has happened to people in my family (likely from gas stations) but we only use credit cards except to pull cash from ATMs, so we only suffer a temporary dip in our available credit line while they investigate and do not have to pay the disputed charges in the meantime. I know people with terrible credit may have problems getting a credit card, and others may have trouble not treating a credit line as spendable beyond their means, but everyone else should keep the 'debit card' at home or at least confined to their wallet.

thegrim000 8mo ago
It's extremely common advice to not keep large sums of cash sitting in your checking account. With capital one (and others) you can just open a free savings account, keep the bulk in there (if you don't want to invest it instead), which earns an actual interest, and then there's never a "big" amount of vulnerable cash sitting in your checking account. There's free/instant transfers between savings and checking when you need to move more into your checking.
- pants2 8mo ago
  Not a great solution to constantly have to top up your checking account with some amount between "I need this much to pay my bills" and "losing this amount would devastating" which for many people has quite some overlap
  - pitaj 8mo ago
    You can pay bills from your savings account with ACH in the US.
    - vel0city 8mo ago
      While Regulation D was lifted a few years ago, there are often still restrictions to the number of withdrawals one can do from a lot of savings accounts.
    - xp84 8mo ago
      Interesting perspective. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the pitch here would be: 1. Paycheck DD → straight to savings 2. "Spending money" for in-person transactions → transfer periodically to checking 3. Use debit card to spend from checking. That's an interesting idea. Actually what is intriguing to me is another angle: I'd still never consider spending with debit. But my problem is that it's essentially impossible to get an ATM card that isn't a debit card anymore, meaning if I want to be able to use an ATM, I have to carry this stupid card around that would be easy to use to drain my checking account. With your approach, if I can get a savings account that is not linked to a checking account, I could use that as my default place where I pay my rent and credit card bills from. But it's a big if, because a lot of savings accounts have limits on how many withdrawals they can have per month, probably a residue of that regulation that someone else said was recently repealed.
  - vel0city 8mo ago
    If most of your income comes from salary/wages, just have the paycheck first hit your normal checking account first and then have scheduled deposits from there into savings accounts someplace else. You generally have enough money in the account to cover your monthly stuff plus a bit of buffer, but have the pile of cash elsewhere in case something happens. This way you're not actively having to top off your normal spending account, but at the same time have a backstop in case that active account gets hit by fraud or whatever. I'd suggest protecting yourself even further and having those accounts be split across two different banks. This way if one of your bank credentials gets hacked or you have some issue with the bank you at least have a chance of still having an account with cash someplace else to cover the short term.
    - xp84 8mo ago
      Highly recommend this approach. My personal approach has been, for almost 20 years, to have one checking account as Schwab, and the other at a credit union. Schwab has superior offerings for most things, refunds all ATM fees worldwide, and is easy to get on the phone if I have any issue, and the credit union can handle those once-in-5-years (for me) kind of in-person situations like getting a cashier's check, or if I wanted $500 in $100 bills for a gift, etc.
reaperducer 8mo ago
fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back I've had this happen to me twice in about 25 years. Neither bank made me wait weeks. The most recent one (with a giant megabank) issued a provisional credit in under an hour. There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online. U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.
- pc86 8mo ago
  They might, and it's good they do, but they're not legally required to in quite the same way that they are with credit cards. If someone pulls $10k out of your BofA account, they're completely within their rights to do basically nothing about it.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8mo ago
  The key with debit cards is the incentive misalignment. With credit, it’s the bank that loses out, not you. With debit, it’s you. Until the consequences are equaled by legislation, there’s no world where they get equal treatment by the bank
  - anonymars 8mo ago
    To add on to that: if someone fraudulently uses your credit card, it's the issuer's money that's now missing and they need to get it back. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card, it's your money that's now missing that you need to get back. Hopefully things don't start overdrawing your account in the meantime.
    - maest 8mo ago
      How come this is not a problem in Europe? Credit cards make same promises there, but usage is greatly diminished.
      - hibikir 8mo ago
tecleandor 8mo ago
That's way less common in Europe. Most places are chip and pin or NFC and that limits skimming quite a lot.
- BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
  Thankfully the US is very slowly catching up. We actually have NFC at most payment terminals already. Even better, our small town (pop. 100) gas station upgraded their pumps a while back, and they have NFC! Finally my normal fill-up location is skimmer-resistant. Or is it skimmer-proof?
  - consp 8mo ago
    > Or is it skimmer-proof? Put a reader with a shield on the pad and a new pad on top and a small terminal in somewhere out of sight. You won't know the difference. Requires infrastructure though so it is a bit more complicated and a lot more noticeable. Likely used the non-pin entry limit which is always reset after you payed a large amount and had to enter your pin. Not like the strip readers of olden days. Anecdote: We had a "chip charge" system where you put money in your card via a ATM like device and those sometimes had strange "extensions" in front of it which read your chip while you charged it and immediately took the money. People often don't know what too look for when it comes to skimming devices and with tech it may look like a strange but genuine device.
    - BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
      Wouldn't that only be able to steal money one time though? Whereas a traditional skimmer captures the card number, and can charge the card indefinitely until the card is reported stolen and replaced.
- what 8mo ago
  How so? My card was skimmed and I had only tapped it in maybe a half dozen locations. Never swiped it or inserted it anywhere or used it online.
silisili 8mo ago
I wish I could scream this from the rooftops. People should keep their debit cards locked/frozen, and only use them to get money from ATMs when needed. All other spending should go onto credit cards, for numerous reasons that have been bought up throughout this thread.
- stackskipton 8mo ago
  Most banks/CU will issue you ATM only card that cannot be used a credit card. Might require some wrangling with the bank.
  - rsingel 8mo ago
    These are increasingly harder to get, sadly. My credit union won't anymore. I have to keep a debit card locked
- hvb2 8mo ago
  Stay on your own rooftop please. That is a very US only view. There's nothing wrong with debit cards being used. If I can shout one thing back up to your rooftop: Why on earth do your transactions cost 2 or 3 percent. For what? For basically verifying an RFID chip and adding a single entry to a ledger? Don't say you're getting it back with points or whatever because we all know that the credit card company won't be going broke so that cut is coming from somewhere. And in the end that's always the consumer
  - silisili 8mo ago
    Of course it's a US view. It's a US site and the OP even prefaced it as such. Does every reply need to do the same? Retailers(in the US) typically eat the cost. Some industries(in the US), like gun shops, are up front about charging more for credit card payments. Most companies(in the US) just see it as cost of doing business. Points have next to nothing to do with why you should always use credit cards(in the US). There are legal consumer protection reasons. The points are just an optional perk.
aprilthird2021 8mo ago
Most 18-22 year olds are living alone for the first time and have just set up their first bank account and are spending all their time focused on studies and trying to get an internship, so they aren't focused on the difference between credit card and debit card, plus they don't spend a lot out anyways
otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
In the rest of the world (not the US), "credit card" == "debit card without zero overdraft limit".
elzbardico 8mo ago
Really, this is a non-existing problem in most places outside the US. Are you still using magnetic stripes?????
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  It's a non existent problem in the US, too. The internet likes to blow things out of proportion, but not only are pretty much all payments made with tap to pay for many years now, even when it was magnetic strip, the incidence rate was miniscule.
  - vel0city 8mo ago
    > It's a non existent problem in the US Dead wrong. Its still a big problem in the US. https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-research-briefings/how-do-consumers-fraud-experiences-vary-with-their-financial-vulnerability/ https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-resea... > In 2023, 21 percent of U.S. consumers experienced financial fraud: 17 percent of all consumers (or 18 percent of consumers who own credit cards) experienced credit card fraud, and 8 percent of all consumers experienced non-credit card fraud (with some consumers experiencing both types of fraud). Sure, we've now moved to do tap to pay and chipped cards for a lot of transactions. However, this is useless for online orders which just requires knowledge of the magic numbers which all are helpfully printed on the face of the card you hand to people, tell over the phone, or type into websites. We need to move towards actually secure online payment systems.
    - xp84 8mo ago
      We are moving towards it... if every site accepted both Apple Pay and Google Pay we'd be there. If we got there, you could make the case that we ought to all be able to file all the numbers off of our cards and never need to give them to anyone. But the problem is that even with 99% adoption, those secrets still have to be printed on the cards and used some percentage of the time to support the laggards -- and it only takes one hack or phish to defraud you.
jms703 8mo ago
Yes, in the US, if you are disciplined to not spend beyond your means, credit cards are much safer to use than debit. Sadly, the last I checked, financial discipline is not taught in our public schools.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]