Word: cards
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...lose the float. Use a credit card, and you will generally have 20 to 30 days to pay the bill. During that time, the earning power of your money is yours, not the merchant's or the bank's. That cushion also gives you time to return defective merchandise or dispute a transaction before you have to pay for it. Not so with debit cards, though issuers are so eager for consumers to embrace them that they routinely "give the customer the benefit of the doubt on a bad transaction," says George Albright of Speer & Associates, an Atlanta-based consultancy...
...lose the miles. These days, points or miles collected on a credit card can be used to pay for everything from round-trip plane tickets to college tuition (on Citibank's Upromise card) to your teen's braces (on Diner's Club, which lets you choose a reward once you hit 100,000 points). Chase allows you to earn Continental Airline miles by using your debit card, but at a rate of half a mile per dollar spent--vs. one mile on the typical credit card...
...lose some security. If your credit cards fall into the wrong hands, you're liable only for the first $50 of expenditures, and many issuers waive that. While the ultimate liability with a debit card is the same, a thief could clean out your checking account before you realize what's happening. (Some 42% of debit cards can be used without a personal identification number, or PIN.) Yes, your bank will give you back the money--Visa requires its issuers to grant you credit within five days, and many do so within 24 hours--but it's a much bigger...
That said, if you are the type of customer who charges one day and regrets it the next, a debit card probably does make sense. Rudy Cavazos, director of corporate relations for moneymanagement.org says there's no doubt that debit cards help keep consumers within their spending limits. "If you use a debit card, you know the money's coming directly from checking," he says. "You know you're not going to accumulate finance charges or fees. If every minimum payment has you feeling like you're spinning your wheels, debit cards...
...first business day of the euro era--because the postal bank, which handles the largest number of small bank accounts in the Netherlands, was not ready for the transition. In France, many motorways backed up as drivers eager to break francs into euro change skipped the credit-card and electronic E-Z pass lanes and jammed tollbooths. Meanwhile, some shopkeepers resisted government urgings to get old currencies out of the system by giving euros as change. "I am not a bank," griped a vegetable seller at the Place d'Aligre market in Paris...