they are still more expensive and if you use some kind of bookkeeping or budgeting software
Not in the slightest (cost me 0), and I do.
cashback
Not the main selling point.
insurance part
That is a good use case: charges easier to dispute & reverse.
A normal bank card spends your real money. Disputing through a bank may take longer. Until the bank returns money to your account, that money is gone.
technical benefit That’s a use case for me: risk mitigation & flexibility to optimize returns on my savings.
Assumptions
- my checking account earns diddly squat interest & risk of unauthorized debits is meaningful (eg, debit cards)
- other accounts of varying liquidity (such as emergency savings, taxed investment, retirement, etc.) earn better
- transferring between accounts (or selling less liquid assets) takes time
- I budget correctly to always spend within my means, so I know enough money is somewhere.
Constantly transferring between accounts for every single transaction is inconvenient. Leaving money in the checking account isn’t ideal due to low interest earnings & risk of unauthorized debits.
Solution
- as much as possible, keep checking account near 0 & keep most money where it earns better returns
- charge expenses to a credit card (at most 30% of its credit limit), then transfer to checking account the total to completely pay off the credit card when convenient well before payment due date.
The credit card is simply an instrument to allow me time & flexibility to move money I already have to pay expenses. The money is usually earning kickass interest (at least enough to beat inflation) somewhere and takes a non-instant amount of time to transfer.
Always completely pay off a credit card by the payment due date. A credit card is a shitty account to carry a debt (any non-0 balance past the due date): only dumbasses do that.
will hurt your credt score
If it works like in the US, then as long as you make mortgage & all other bill payments on time, completely pay off credit cards by payment due dates, and keep credit utilization low (at most 30% of card’s credit limit), you should be fine.
Taking out a mortgage temporarily lowers your credit score until it recovers with consistent repayments over a few months. Then the added credit mix usually improves credit scores.
Are mortgages not paid there in regular installments with due amounts like in the US?
the average joe
You don’t have an account (maybe savings) that earns better interest? You’re not saving for emergencies, retirement, or goals?
the responsibility of the credit card
It’s usually just slack time (until payment due date) to make a payment you would already make some other way.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 hours ago
I work at an accounting firm and part of my job is advising on automation software and the like, automating credit cards is a hassle and often impossible. Sometimes when it is possible, only half the transactions are posted (just the payments and not the money received from other your bank account).
If they don’t cost you any more, then those are the once which are expensive on the stores you buy from. For one, there is additional bookkeeping to be done (deduct the costs from the payment when receiving the money) and the extra costs itself.
For a lot of people on the internet, that small cashback is their reason they use it.,
A normal bank card is way harder to even get into a situation where you need to open a dispute and most credit card companies do not care about you getting scammed either btw because you authorised the transaction.
Unauthorised debits are such a rare thing, nobody is going to accidentally wire money to you. Unless you are a business and it’s a double payment.
You are also explaining the reasons as to why I said that technical benefit of earning money on borrowed money is bullshit for the average Joe. Why are we discussing this if we agree it’s bullshit?
Transfers between accounts are instant these days and payments on your normal bank accounts can be a lot larger than on most credit cards. Credit cards are limited to 1k, 2.5k or 5k for most private individuals since you generally need to make x amount more a month (after taxes) than the limit of the card. The maximum on basically every bank account of a private individual is 50k
Irrelevant issue, you still gotta do this with a credit card since you have to pay off the dang thing. Most things are also a consistent thing and a monthly thing. You also mean unauthorised credits, btw. Banks turn around debit and credit like it’s their party.
This happens way more than you think, remember most people are terrible with money. You see this even more in countries like the US, where people take out loans for everything.
In a lot of scenarios, they look at what you can monthly spend, because your past experiences don’t dictate your future. In NL and other countries it works something like this, but it is a lot more complicated in practise. If you have a monthly income of 5k, you pay say 1k taxes from that, which means you have 4k left over. In NL, there is something saying that you can only spend say 75% of your net income on loans. In this example, that’s 3k. If you have a car loan for 1k a month and a credit card of 1k and a phone where you pay 50 bucks for and a student loan where you pay 50 bucks for. Which means you can only spend 900 euro on your mortgage. In the US system you might be able to take a mortgage of 2k (just guessing/execrating) because you always paid off your phone, car and credit card loans nicely. Which means you would spend 3,1k a month on loans. Which is one way that a people get into financial trouble.
And this is why the US credit score is bullshit because yes we do, everywhere in the world.
Ofc we have savings for emergencies, most people do. Most of my emergency fund is located in a savings account, but still instantly accessible, which means it is at a low interest rate. I could lock the money for a year to get like 2.9% interest instead of the 1.2% I am getting or something (it’s on a free account).
Only the first month, after that it doesn’t really matter.