Hacker News Reader

Comment by heurisko | Hacker News Reader

> Never owned a credit card, don't have the slightest wish to do so.

I own a credit card, as you get additional consumer protections using a credit card rather than a debit card in the UK.

Pay it off in full every month. No problem.

Specifically, the main protection is that if you buy something that turns out to be faulty or the company never delivers the goods, you can get the money back without going to court. You get the money back even if the company goes bankrupt.

Some banks offer similar things on debit cards, but it's always at the banks discretion rather than required by law.

(*) over £100

It is an insurance policy then. Have you calculated how much this insurance cost you? Credit card fees, the inevitable 'forgot to pay it off' etc.

There is no "inevitable forgot to pay it off". Last century when I was old enough I got a credit card and the bank set it to automatically pay off every month. The bank says to itself, full balance of this account this month is say £462.83 and must be paid on or before the 7th of December, then it sets a transfer to occur from my checking account for the amount £462.83 on the 7th of December. No "forgetting" possible.

Indeed if say an IT problem occurs and they can't do that transfer under UK law they eat the fees incurred. "The customer must be made whole".

As to fees, the merchant doesn't have to accept cards, as we see with Amazon, if they don't like the fees. Why should ordinary consumers care? When we were part of the EU the cards couldn't charge excessive fees, now Brexit allowed them to unlock this potential source of profit.

In the UK, credit cards are free (some specialist cards aside), including an automatic direct debit so you never forget to pay it off, so you never get charged interest.

Never paid a penny in fees or interest in over 15 years.... and an annual statement of fees (issued by law) informs me of this fact each year.

Same in the US. Credit cards are so convenient and free and come with rewards. Of course most people don’t realize until they are older that all that ‘money back rewards’ was essentially paid by themselves originally, by the vendor paying the credit card company a fee on every transaction. The issue is that credit card companies build in requirements to be endorsed that they don’t charge different prices for cash only transactions often.

Yes. Anyone paying fees on a credit card should jump ship, that's a huge red flag. And I've made more in cash back rewards than I'll ever pay in interest.

The credit card fee is included in the price of the item, whether you use a credit card or a debit card, it's there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com