Having worked in the payments arena for some time, my advice to friends is avoid using a debit card if at all possible. From a consumer protection and security standpoint, a traditional credit card is far more protective.
Legally, the most you are liable for any fraudulent transactions is $50 and most card issuers waive even that. Debit does not have these same protections and as already stated, compromised cards can allow thieves to drain your entire bank account and you’re stuck trying to prove the fraud before you can get your money back.
Merchants want you to use debit and will actively promote and push this as the first (and sometimes only) choice at checkout because it saves them substantial amounts of money on fees. This comes at a cost of your protections so my advice is to always use credit when possible (and pay off your balance each month of course).
I agree with you that it all seems like a scam. But a mortgage can be a better way to get scammed than paying rent: With a mortgage on a house you know your rent isn’t ever going to increase*, if you are out of work for a few months you are less likely to wind up homeless (foreclosure takes a lot longer than eviction), and if you live there for a while, there is a pretty good chance you’ll be able to sell it for more than you bought it for.
*ok, taxes might go up significantly if, say, Amazon moves to town. But rents will go up a lot higher.
Yeah and then the housing market crashes due to bundled tranches of toxic assets and you get foreclosed on without missing a payment anyway. Or on tge first missed payment
Happened to a lot of people. Nothing is preventing it from happening again
OTOH, if you own, you don’t have the worries of renoviction or the landlord selling the place. Doesn’t matter how good you are at paying the rent when that happens.
That you have to pay to know your credit score, and that checking your credit hurts your credit.
That’s fucking insane. Being responsible about your credit will both hurt your credit and cost money. Because the fucking economy is backwards and designed to bilk money out of everyone except the richest ten people at the top.
I don’t understand why so many people I know buy cars they can’t afford. I can understand financing if you actually need a car and can’t afford one, but I know people who could buy a perfectly serviceable new car with cash, but instead took out a loan on a $70k Tesla. A Nissan Leaf is $30k, so with the Tesla you’re paying $40k more for… a status symbol and a toy.
Household debt and student loan figures tell you how much borrowing is out there. It doesn’t of itself tell you whether everyone is happily skipping along, merrily paying off the loans as they fall due while piling up savings elsewhere.
How overdue their car loan payments are tells you how close they are to losing what for most people is their major or second major asset and generally one of the last things they allow to fall behind (even including their mortgage/rent) because they need it.
In other words delinquency on car loans tells you fairly well exactly how fucked up your economy is.
Sure, just picking an example that’s more directly comparable, being electric. The reduced operating costs might make up the difference over time, especially with California gas prices? I have no idea, I don’t own a car so I don’t think too much about how much they cost.
Since 2013, California has added over a million registered non-citizen drivers who were previously ineligible for licenses. Prior to that, they were driving illegally or (more likely) getting by with other available modes of transportation. Over the same period, access to L.A.'s rail network has been expanding and the transportation agencies have become openly hostile to providing more infrastructure to accommodate more cars. So, new owners of cars may not rank car ownership with the same priority as the typical L.A. driver did 20-30 years ago. I’m seeing this reflected in the attitudes of teens and 20 somethings now as well.
