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Debit Cards and Responsibility

How do you teach your children the value of money when you are so busy stretching it from paycheck to paycheck? When I became a single mother with lots of debt and bad credit I was determined that Hailey would never find herself in the same boat. When I was growing up we never talked about money, all we heard was that we had none. We had no idea why or where it went. I didn’t realize all the things that went into maintaining a home until I had my first apartment. Who knew you had to pay a light … Continue reading →

Debit Card Risks

If you are looking to put the brakes on out of control spending habits, financial experts recommend slicing and dicing your credit cards and using a debit card or cash to purchase necessities. Debit cards make it easy to keep track of spending. Since the card is automatically denied if you don’t have the cash in your account to cover the cost of the item you are purchasing, it’s impossible to buy things you cannot afford. Unfortunately, debit cards are not perfect. While they may look identical to credit cards, they don’t come with the same features. For example, if … Continue reading →

Thinking Twice About Using Your Debit Card

CNN has scarred me from using my debit card. The cable news network’s story on skimming makes me want to cut-up my card and use cash only for purchases. For those of you who missed CNN’s piece (or similar stories broadcast on other networks), skimming is a practice perfected by thieves looking to capture your bank card information by sliding it through a special machine. The device, which is often placed over real card slots at ATMs and other payment terminals, reads the card’s magnetic strip and basically gives complete strangers access to your checking account. According to financial service … Continue reading →

Back-to-School Debit Cards

Back-to-school is infiltrating every aspect of my finances, from my wallet to my bank statements. My latest statement included a brochure on debit cards for college co-eds. Apparently, my bank offers a special card program designed specifically for students who are leaving the nest this fall. In the case of my bank, parents must open and maintain the accounts, though their college-bound students can access the funds via a bank-issued Visa or MasterCard debit card. Moms and dads can then track their kid’s spending throughout the academic year. Bank cards are just one of dozens of options parents have if … Continue reading →

Debit Card Fees

I was driving home the other day and the radio host was talking about banking fees. I wish I hadn’t been almost at our destination because I would have enjoyed hearing more of the show. The part I heard was about new fees for using debit cards. I love my debit card. It’s fast and it’s easy. It’s not a credit card, so I can spend only the money I have. It’s not checks, so I don’t have to carry a pen or hold up a line filling in the blanks. Debit cards are one of the best advancements in … Continue reading →

Making Sure Your Kids Understand Debit and Credit Cards

Money is a difficult concept to understand, especially when it comes in so many different forms—checks, currency, coins. Add to that the concept of debit cards and credit cards, it really gets confusing, and kids don’t always grasp all the nuances. They see their parents swipe a card in a machine, the cashier lets them keep the stuff they chose, and it’s all pretty cool. When we use plastic instead of paper money, it can lead our children to have a disconnect between the reality that in order to spend money at the store, we need to make it and … Continue reading →

How to Transition From Using Credit Cards to a Cash Based Lifestyle

If you would like to stop using credit cards because you have not been able to use them the way that you had intended to use them, there are some things that you can do to make a transition over to a mostly cash (and debit card) based way of life. You may want to do this sooner rather than later, especially if you have quite a bit of credit card debt. In fact, if you have enough credit card debt that you are having trouble paying, the transition to a cash and debit card based existence may be forced … Continue reading →

Avoid Prepaid Debit Card Fraud

Reloadable debit cards like the Green Dot MoneyPak can be a convenient way to pay bills or fund your PayPal account. Unfortunately, criminal minds have been hard at work lately creating a variety of scams whereby they obtain MoneyPak card numbers and then use whatever balance is left on the card. If you have a MoneyPak card or other prepaid debit card, protect yourself from fraud with the following tips. Many of the current scams involving MoneyPak cards closely resemble scams that have been around for some time, where wire transfers of funds are requested. Since smart consumers have caught … Continue reading →

Surviving without Credit Cards

Getting rid of all of your credit cards is one of the strongest messages you get when you are trying to get out of debt. The reason is that credit cards allow us to spend more money that we should, essentially taking out a loan at a very high interest rate that compounds and compounds and can easily get out of control. In previous generations, it would take a lot for someone to consider going in to debt for even something as substantial to quality of living as a house. Once credit cards came along, people were willing to go … Continue reading →

Credit vs Debit: Dave Ramsey Weighs In

If you think that using a credit card is safer than using a debit card, you may change your mind after hearing what personal finance guru Dave Ramsey has to say about the real advantages and disadvantages of using credit and debit cards. According to Ramsey, one very important disadvantage of using credit cards is that they allow users to incur debt – something that does not happen with debit cards because you are limited by the amount of funds in your bank account at any given time. I really never thought about it that way, but it makes a … Continue reading →