alt Hacker News(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.
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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.
Really, this is a non-existing problem in most places outside the US. Are you still using magnetic stripes?????
That's way less common in Europe. Most places are chip and pin or NFC and that limits skimming quite a lot.
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.
In the rest of the world (not the US), "credit card" == "debit card without zero overdraft limit".
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
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.