241–250 of 445 posts
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Paraphrasing a lot, I think the advice is to have one credit card for scheduled payments and things, and not take that out of the house. That way if your out and about card gets replaced, you won't need to go through and update all your scheduled payments.
I can't be the only one that uses my once-every-18-month credit card cancellation to help me track down the services that I forgot I had subscribed to.
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>It is very clear that most merchants earn more from people using credit cards more often, otherwise there is no reason they would try to dissuade or offset it by adding a premium for using credit cards. Can you elaborate? IME merchants do NOT want people to use credit cards; transaction fees eat into the sale price. I remember a time when some electronics stores would explicitly advertise a cash discount, so as to a…
Cash management is also very expensive for most merchants. There are effectively 3 reasons merchants might prefer cards to cash these days a) their volume is so low that cash management is not an issue (that is the transaction fees) b) their margins are so low on a particular item that the transaction fee eats all of it but the broader business still uses credit cards or c) they do not want an electronic record of th…
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You missed the biggest advantage of credit cards - the limited liability of the card holder to fraudulent charges! From a financial website… “ CREDIT CARDS Credit cards offer consumers the widest fraud protection. By Federal law, a cardholder is only liable for the first $50 of an unauthorized transaction at most, with many issuers offering cards with zero liability. DEBIT CARDS Debit card holders are protected under…
I've taken this one step further and I now use a full-on burner credit card. It has no autopay or reoccurring payments associated with it so I could light it on fire and not be too upset about it. I' have all my autopayments set up on a specific card that never leaves a drawer in my house. End result is that when the burner card gets compromised, as it does several times a year at gas pumps and such, I toss it out, g…
One of the under appreciated legal precedents set a couple years ago was the Ohio V AmEx anti trust case. The case predicated against AmEx’s merchant contract forbidding merchants to steer customers away from using their Amex card. This was a common practice for many years, especially at restaurants since AmEx charged restaurants 6%. The Supreme Court ruled that amex was able to keep the anti-steering provision in me…
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yes, never use your debit card and use only credit cards online, but cash is better for non-major in-person purchases as it's inherently private and anonymous. it's also better for the payee (hopefully a local retailer not a mega-corp), since they don't have to pay the fees. for major in-person purchases, the extra (fraud, warranty, etc.) protections provided by the credit card may be worth the privacy/anonymity trad…
"non-major in-person purchases as it's inherently private and anonymous" Most of the time that's an anti-feature - there is no point of hiding transactions of you buying bread, it could provide you an alibi in case you are accused of a crime, but there is no conceivable way it could be used against you.. (people don't stop to buy bread on the way to the crime scene)
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You can send money via Zelle instantly, but I would stick to check or ACH purposes for legal dispute reasons in the case of conducting business, especially paying rent.
Zelle has a few thousand dollar per day/week/month limit, which, at least in the Bay Area, is too low for rent.
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I find this ironic since now days it seems every store has its own credit card. I even have a card from pep boys (and was given a free oil change just to sign up.)
It's because there are white label credit cards that are extremely easy to setup if you're a business and they're so profitable. Not only does the store get a sale upfront which a customer might not have been able to afford without it, they get additional revenue when folks are slow to repay their bill.
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I got burned by Aliexpress and now I highly recommend people use credit cards for all purchases. I had a debit card saved on Aliexpress. The account was compromised by unknown means (maybe public wifi). Someone bought several $1,000+ phones from China that shipped to me in the US. I presume the sellers were in on it and were selling me unwanted inventory at inflated prices. Because they had tracking information, my b…
> Moral of the story: don't use debit cards I use a debit card for groceries and such. However, just to be sure, my paycheck goes to an account with no cards attached. I then transfer small amounts ($100 or so) every now and then to the debit card account. This limits my exposure to card fraud, and also has the nice side benefit of giving me back some of that "spending feeling" that cash has. If I have to transfer sa…
Sure was an awkward call with the USAA security department after they worked out the exact timeline and actions of the attack. They didn't really have much to say in their own defense. Cost them about five grand in the end. The really annoying part is that now if my wife needs to call them for anything on the phone they make her jump through many hoops to identify herself. E.g. she has to answer the credit bureau-based questions every time, plus a PIN, plus a phone password. We may move banks just so we're not stuck with an online-only relationship because of this experience.
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Which is why I cringed at patio11's twitter thread where he insisted that the banking system is one giant kumbaya circle that works together to Do The Right THing https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1443745867572277250
I've worked for a bank, let's just say that I can't agree with that. A US bank at that. I just noticed: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1443756566822285334
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You missed the biggest advantage of credit cards - the limited liability of the card holder to fraudulent charges! From a financial website… “ CREDIT CARDS Credit cards offer consumers the widest fraud protection. By Federal law, a cardholder is only liable for the first $50 of an unauthorized transaction at most, with many issuers offering cards with zero liability. DEBIT CARDS Debit card holders are protected under…
I've taken this one step further and I now use a full-on burner credit card. It has no autopay or reoccurring payments associated with it so I could light it on fire and not be too upset about it. I' have all my autopayments set up on a specific card that never leaves a drawer in my house. End result is that when the burner card gets compromised, as it does several times a year at gas pumps and such, I toss it out, g…