How Millennials Became Spooked by Credit Cards

juillet
Tue, 23 Aug 2016 03:28:39 +0000

It blows my mind that people use debit cards instead of credit cards. Debit cards are just so unsecured and you’re basically SOL if there’s fraud.

Not necessarily, Especially if you have a Visa or MasterCard debit card, they have many of the same protections that a credit card does. I was the victim of identity theft with my Visa debit card a couple years ago and the charges were reversed and money back in my account within weeks. It’s not the same as cash.

You can also easily get hotels, rental cars and airline tickets with debit cards.

I actually don’t think most people use credit cards responsibly. Some do, but not most.

Also - there’s a lot here about parents teaching millennials to be responsible and stuff, but remember too that most parents themselves are not financially savvy and a lot of the risk-aversiveness that some millennials experience might be due to watching our parents crash and burn with credit, especially if we grew up in working-class or lower-class households. My parents were working-class, and they did not teach me responsible money management. I had to learn on my own. They also did not have the credit and the money to put me on their credit cards as an authorized user to practice with some guidance, so the first time I had a credit card was when I got my own at age 18, with no guidance.

Most of my friends and I are first-generation students and we make more money than our parents did even in our first jobs out of college, many times, so we had to learn on our own. That’s the case for lots and lots of millennials.

I’m pretty debt averse, myself. I’d rather buy things in cash than use a credit card.