341–350 of 398 posts
The beginning of this article is a fairy tale that ignores what used to be one of the biggest drivers of revenue for banks: overdraft fees. Maybe the HN crowd has never been in a situation where they were auto-billed into a negative balance, which then caused an overdraft fee that then further drove their balance into negative territory, but this was a weekly/monthly fiasco for millions of Americans. I was once in a…
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I mean it’s a hyper growth startup. Expect to haul ass.
Stripe is 12 years old, has ~4,000 employees, and does several billion in revenue each year. It’s not a startup anymore. Although I do agree with your general sentiment that if you want real work-life balance, an actual startup is probably not for you.
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This is what I do as well. Monthly bills are all direct debit, but almost all other spending goes on my credit card, and, without exception, I paying it off completely at the end of the month. I've done this for decades, and never paid a penny in interest - the key is to not spend money you don't have. I get some small amount of Amazon vouchers every month for doing this (£10/m or something like that), but really I d…
Glad it works for you, we are very good at budgeting but i find u less you put 100% of the “cash” like spending on the credit card it falls apart as you can double spend without realising and when we tried it for a few months I hated paying for August’s groceries in mid October - it just felt weird to me, far easier just to have a set XX amount in a current account each month and spend it down to 0 through the month…
The beginning of this article is a fairy tale that ignores what used to be one of the biggest drivers of revenue for banks: overdraft fees. Maybe the HN crowd has never been in a situation where they were auto-billed into a negative balance, which then caused an overdraft fee that then further drove their balance into negative territory, but this was a weekly/monthly fiasco for millions of Americans. I was once in a…
Edit: just saw another comment on reordering by tx size, omg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29210357
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What? That seems totally backwards. Don't spend money you don't have, which mean using debit. Credit is useful for the single use case of buying a house.
Why spend your own money when someone is willing to loan you money for free, will give you some of your money back, and will also protect you against consumer issues? You’re leaving money and protection on the table by not using them.
That's why I would rather spend my own money when someone is willing to lend it to me for free.
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Yea. For people who aren't familiar with this, the bank will reorder your transactions and batch them to do the biggest one first. Then you get charged an overdraft fee per transaction after that. If they did the small ones first, you may not go into overdraft until the last big one... So you'd pay one fee. Do the largest first, then each small one causes a fee. Highway robbery.
In 2004 I was traveling around Europe as a 20 year old. Spent my debit account down to my last $20. I had a flight from Barcelona back to Boise and the airline had supposedly issued a paper ticket, not an e-ticket. Long story short, if I couldn’t produce the paper ticket, my flight was going to leave without me. I didn’t have a credit card and I knew I was out of money but I said what the hell, try my debit card to p…
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Long back when I worked in my first job at a large private bank, I remember being in a meeting where they spoke about overdraft fees + late fees + interest on these + god knows what else and the lady, our systems counterpart, looked at all of us and said 'We better plan a trip to Ganges to atone for all this and we might need to go ever year' (it's a common saying in India, as Ganges is supposed to wash away one's si…
Your comment seems false given private banks commonly don’t charge overdraft fees, or late fees, or interest charges.
not sure that late fees or interest fee apply, unless you consider things like paying BAM late on a mortgage payment - surely has a late fee.. perhaps if you have one of those account like. free checking so long as your balance stays above 1500 or/and you use your debit card 15 times a month to push fee onto retailers.. if these are not met you could say it'd be like a late fee.
I've seen news stories that have discussed discovery of some banks structuring debits to an account with the same 24 hour period that would cause an overdraft.. so take out all the payments and then apply your deposit after those are settled - now that is super extra shady.
personally I'd just prefer them to bounce back and refuse a payment if there was not enough money in the account. Although I was charged for a bounced/bad check someone had given me at one point, so I'm guessing they could find a way to charge for similar.
Maybe I am missing the qualifier in "'private' banks" in that statement - but I've seen a lot of people pay a lot of overdraft fees and have accounts closed for them, not sure what "private" banks don't do such things, or how common uncommon.
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Yea. For people who aren't familiar with this, the bank will reorder your transactions and batch them to do the biggest one first. Then you get charged an overdraft fee per transaction after that. If they did the small ones first, you may not go into overdraft until the last big one... So you'd pay one fee. Do the largest first, then each small one causes a fee. Highway robbery.
In 2004 I was traveling around Europe as a 20 year old. Spent my debit account down to my last $20. I had a flight from Barcelona back to Boise and the airline had supposedly issued a paper ticket, not an e-ticket. Long story short, if I couldn’t produce the paper ticket, my flight was going to leave without me. I didn’t have a credit card and I knew I was out of money but I said what the hell, try my debit card to p…
In a way though I feel like the American system is set up to traumatize you for being poor so much that you develop the thirst to become a millionaire one day when these things don’t affect you.
Use credit card, it’s the card issuers that are on the hook for fraud. It’ll help you build credit. Use debit when you don’t have the means or credit history.
Do what makes sense in your country.
The beginning of this article is a fairy tale that ignores what used to be one of the biggest drivers of revenue for banks: overdraft fees. Maybe the HN crowd has never been in a situation where they were auto-billed into a negative balance, which then caused an overdraft fee that then further drove their balance into negative territory, but this was a weekly/monthly fiasco for millions of Americans. I was once in a…
This happened to me once, at BofA, before web-based and app-based banking so you only got verification that things were what you thought they were when you got your monthly statement, went to an ATM or teller, or used a cumbersome telephone interface via a touch tone phone: 1. Initial balances: -L on BofA credit card, 0 on checking account, S in savings/investments. When I write a check I transfer money from savings…