December 10th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
The WSJ Economics Blog reports that a Federal Reserve study notes that debit card usage is on the rise, outpacing a smaller credit card gain and a decrease in check usage.
I admit that I’m a fan of using debit card as credit card, except when it comes to hotels and rentals. I don’t have an interest-bearing checking account, so I have no incentive to have a slow method of payment such as mailing checks. Electronic downloads to Microsoft Money are a nice automated corroboration — check registers are not friendly to my poor penmenship.
Hopefully the rise of debit cards will mean that people will bounce less checks and borrow less on their credit cards to get that convenience. The points program for my debit card pales to what I could do with my American Express. My bank needs to work on that.
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December 11th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Unfortunately, I think that the convenience of having debit cards will likely increase, not decrease, the number of overdrafts, simply because they’re so much easier to use. As far as bounced “checks” go, well, I guess since there are fewer of them in circulation, that’s partly true, but it causes the same problem.
Check registers can still be used with debit cards, and should be. Either that or people should have some other method of keeping track of their spending like they did with check registers, like you mentioned with Microsoft Money. Using an Excel spreadsheet works, too.
That way you can come up with your own accounting system.
Debit cards are often just as easy as credit cards, and a lot more convenient than checks. They are also welcomed in more places than checks are.
Checks have their place, but that place is disappearing.