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.
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.
I've been through it personally and with friends.
My experience was basically yours. I am a relatively highly paid professional with a large amount of assets with my bank. I get pretty good service, even at my giant national retail bank. I call, make a demand, they tend to just do it without too many questions.
My more low income friends have also gone through it, and I've assisted with them since they were panic'ing. Their experience is absolutely nothing like mine. Every single one spent days to weeks being sandbagged by sometimes the same bank I dealt with on my issue.
Your experience will very greatly depending on how "valuable" of a customer your bank feels you are to them.
> U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.
On paper, sure. In practice, no. Funds frozen during an "investigation" matter a whole lot more when it's your money vs. a made up credit limit number that wasn't real to begin with.
Also, that means the person had the PIN too? That becomes harder to defend
Relatedly, the credit card system is truly a tragedy of the commons situation.
It's a ~2% drag on the economy for what? For some silly points with constrained value and an excuse to not build better financial infrastructure.
The frustrating thing is that, given the current equilibrium, you're a sucker for not using a credit card - you end up subsidising those who do.
points are just premiums: some insurance consumers are a greater risk, and so pay more.
any convenience features are built on top of the insurance product: _because_ all players are covered, _therefore_ i can make online purchases. _since_ (i have a justified expectation that) i am not liable for fraudulent use of my account number, _therefore_ i can read it to a customer service rep over the phone.
we can of course debate whether 2% is a good price for this coverage! but there must be some price paid here -- if the insurance broker doesn't collect it, the scammers will. this, after all, is the real tragedy.
Yes we'll open a dispute. Yes we'll give you a credit immediately. But then we just take the sellers word for it that they're trying to make it right and charge you anyway.
This is my one singular experience with a dispute but that's with a big bank getting almost all of my transactions over the course of years....
Slowly over the next three months the charges were slowly reversed. In the end the bank didn't reverse all of them, but my friend did get most of her money back.
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.
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.
All other spending should go onto credit cards, for numerous reasons that have been bought up throughout this thread.
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
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.
This is what I really have a problem with. It feels so incomprehensible to me that, assuming you're an adult, you can think this.
It's just a cost, if that cost didn't exist then either the price would be lower or the margin would be higher. In the end you're paying for it. You're the one exchanging money for a good/service.
This is proven by your other comment about how some sectors give you the option. I would rather have that option because those legal protections are useless for the majority of purchases. Good luck disputing that burrito you bought or those groceries. In such transactions you're basically just inviting a company to take a cut for 0 added benefit (aside from points).
Dead wrong. Its still a big problem in the US.
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.
Waiter presents me the machine, I insert my card or wave it over the NFC reader of the machine, if I insert the card, machine always ask for pin, if I use NFC, it will ask sometimes based on some obscure criteria.
For really expensive transactions, eventually, I may get a notification on my bank app in the phone, asking me if I am really, really doing this, I authenticate with biometrics and click ok.
it is not that hard.
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?
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.
