I’m amazed at the degree to which you and I differ. Not saying one position is wrong and the other right, just so different!
As I said before, I have just two credit cards, and a debit card. The premium credit card has a credit limit that would literally allow me to buy a very nice new car and put it on the card, if the dealer accepted credit cards. Theoretically I need no other, but the other is a backup and also the card I use for online purchases. It’s the one that Amazon has on file.
As for auto-pay, no thanks. I’d rather have just the two credit card bills to worry about and pay them myself. There is one – and only one – entity that I allow to pull money from my account, and that is my home and auto insurance company. Because you don’t want your insurance to lapse – Murphy’s Law guarantees that something awful will happen if it does – but also because with some auto insurance companies, your excellent deep-discount safe-driver record suddenly disappears if your policy lapses. You try to renew your policy and the insurance company basically says, “do I know you? No, I don’t believe I do!”.
For sure there’s no one right way to do this stuff. As long as one isn’t paying interest, one is winning the game; the rest is just tactics.
My autopay is all “push” from my bank. I too never let anyone “pull” directly from my assets. Too many ways for you / me to be the party left holding the bag when stuff goes wrong. Which, given enough accounts and enough months, is statistically certain to happen eventually.
I solve the insurance company problem by having them charge my car insurance to one of my credit cards.
And while I was typing, one of my heavy credit card’s bank’s computer pinged me to notify me that it had received and credited my monthly balance payoff that my bank’s computer had obediently sent them yesterday based on the bill the CC’s computer had sent it, and me, the month prior. Which represents yet another 30 to 59-day interest free loan on a nice chunk of change. Which I expended zero effort getting or supervising.
“Have your computer call my computer; they’ll do lunch”. Seems to be a motto for the 21st Century. So far.
If my debit card is physically stolen and used before I report the loss to the bank, I am liable for only the first £35 of fraudulent use. In the case of unauthorised transactions (like if someone copies the card details and uses them for an online purchase), I’m not liable at all. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘way worse’ than a credit card.
Edit: It looks like that £35 limit has changed recently and only applies in the case where the card issuer can prove that the cardholder was grossly negligent. Otherwise, everything gets refunded.
In the US if your debit account gets stolen and it’s linked to your bank, your entire account can be drained. Sure you can eventually get it figured out but until then, you’re fucked.
This. We had one for some years, but after some (fortunately minor) inconveniences when it was deactivated and reissued after a data breach we got a second one.
I don’t understand this. Suppose you have a $5,000 credit card bill. Was this because you took a week trip to Paris or because someone hacked your credit card? If you looked at the statement before you did a push payment you would instantly know. But how is your autopay supposed to distinguish the two scenarios without any effort from you? I don’t see the difference from the credit card company just pulling the payment from your bank and your “push” autopay.
You’re right the difference is blurred versus the pure case of my manually ordering the push payment.
From the time I receive an email from the CC telling me they’ve sent a bill for $5000 to my bank until the bank sends out the corresponding payment is ~20 days. If I want to look at the CC website or phone app looking for any unexpected transactions I can do so. If I don’t I don’t.
I suppose the big difference from my POV is that I am not very concerned about unexpected transactions on my CCs. The CCs’ fraud algorithms seem to be real good at detecting those. I usually have a pretty good idea of what the expected monthly total will be and if I do get an e-bill for a materially different number I’ll probably notice and investigate.
The risk I’m much more concerned about is a generic biller mistakenly pulling more money, or more often, than expected. Or being unwilling to stop pulling when told. Which concern is less aimed at major name brand credit card companies and more at gym subscriptions, porn website subscriptions (just kidding), landlords, car payments, etc.
Which led me years ago to a general policy of no automated pull payments. Might be an obsolete concern, or one that I’m at least partly violating with my e-bill → autopay approach.
But that’s what’s going on in my (perhaps confused) head.
And there is no legal responsibility for anyone else to bear the cost.
Here in the good 'ol US of A …
If somebody steals your credit card and gets away with buying $1000 of goods on your CC, you call the CC company and they (or somebody else in the transaction chain) eats the $1K; you pay nothing. By law.
If somebody steals your debit card and gets away with buying $1000 of goods on your DC, you call the DC company = your bank and they say “Sux to be you; you’re out $1K”. You pay everything. By law.
Seems pretty clear to me which scenario I’d rather be involved in.
Also not a bad idea to have cards on different networks. My main credit card and debit card are Visa, and my gas station/backup card is a MasterCard. I can remember at least one time where Visa’s network was down so both my credit and debit cards were borked.
Yeah, it’s not like that here in the UK - we have something called The Payment Services Regulations (2017) which states (amongst many other things) that it’s the service provider’s responsibility to ensure customer consent for all transactions - which in practice means if a transaction happens on a stolen card, they’re on the hook, not the cardholder.
Googling, in the United States if your ATM or debit card is lost or stolen, your liability is limited to fifty bucks if you report the lost or stolen card within two days of learning of the loss or theft. More than two business days after you learn about the loss or theft, but within sixty calendar days after your statement is sent to you? Your maximum loss is limited to $500.
There is, I suppose, still the inconvenience of having money drained from your account (until it is refunded), but I don’t keep all of my money in the account that the debit card draws from
I’m not up on the latest laws and in any case US law is irrelevant to me, but I think it’s still safe to say that credit cards are much safer to use than debit cards, even if you do indeed (eventually) get your money back from debit card fraud. A lost or stolen credit card can’t drain your bank account; a debit card can.
In my anecdotal experience, disputing an incorrect credit card transaction is trivially easy. The issuer will likely check to see if there’s evidence that you authorized the transaction. In the olden days, that would be the presence of your signature on the transaction slip. In modern times, it would be the use of the correct PIN. In the absence of that evidence, the charge is cancelled, case closed. For non-trivial amounts, the CC issuer may ask for a letter attesting to the fact that the charge isn’t yours, but that’s as far as it goes.
Conversely, though I’ve fortunately never had my debit card hacked, a friend of mine did, while he was traveling in Europe. I don’t remember all the details but it involved some sharp-eyed Frenchman in Paris observing him entering his PIN at an ATM. I’m not sure how that benefited the Frenchman but it may have involved a subsequent pickpocket event. In any case, he did get most or all of his money back, but it took many months. I now heed the advice to never use my debit card for retail transactions, and only use it for withdrawals and deposits at an ATM, and moreover, only at the ATMs of my actual bank, not those third-party convenience store ATMs.
It depends on the card. Discover is very good - they alerted me when a (legitimate) Patreon payment I made came from England. I was happy to be bothered.
Mastercard, not so good. A local dumpling house stole my number, and a day later rfiles were sent from two different places to an address in North Hollywood. I have never, ever, bought guns, the zip code used was wrong, and the address was an abandoned building. Not a peep. It took months for me to get the charge reversed.
I knew this because I called the police there and happened to be connected to the guy who was the expert.
Object lesson here. Are you absolutely, automatically protected against all credit card fraud? No, you are not.
In this particular case, the bank appeared to be relying on the principle that they’re not responsible if the cardholder could be shown to be “grossly negligent”. The case is ongoing.
And, although that doesn’t appear to be immediately relevant here, one should be aware that in general, in the modern day of smart cards and the absence of signature slips, the CC issuer considers the entry of the correct PIN to be proof of authenticity, exactly equivalent to a verified signature.. Anyone stupid enough to have their PIN written down anywhere in the vicinity of their credit card, such as anywhere in their wallet, are well and truly screwed if that wallet is lost or stolen.
