The Advantages of Debit Vs. Credit Purchases

It's usually easier to get a debit card than a credit card because you're tapping the funds in your checking account when you make debit-card purchases. Poor credit histories can prevent people from getting credit cards, but credit profiles typically don't come into play when a person applies for a debit card. People who manage their checking accounts responsibly likely won't have trouble getting a debit card.

Debt

Credit cards offer the opportunity to pay for purchases at a later date. Yet that can be a problem for some people who don't control their spending. Their "buy-now-pay-later" mindset can result in them racking up more debt than they can afford to pay. Money for debit-card purchases is drawn out of a person's checking account almost immediately. This can be a safeguard against falling into deep debt because purchases are limited by the amount of cash in a checking account. Debit cards also force people to pay more attention to how they manage cash so that they don't exceed their checking account balances through debit-card purchases.

Interest Charges

Debit-card and credit-card may pay account fees. The amount of those fees varies among card issuers. Still, debit cards don't come with the interest charges that credit cards have. Credit-card users who carry a balance on their cards can pay 18 percent or more in interest charges every month. They also can be subjected to higher interest rates if they're consistently late with their payments or exceed their credit limits. The combination of fees and interest charges can make it difficult to pay off credit-card debt.

Security

Debit-card users receive a confidential personal identification number (PIN) that must be used to access the money in their accounts when making a purchase. Those PIN numbers offer extra security that credit cards lack, since credit-card transactions usually just require a signature. There is no way of knowing if the person signing for a credit-card purchase is the owner of the card unless a retailer checks that person's identification. Many stores now have terminals where customers simply swipe their credit cards and sign for a purchase on the terminal screen, which makes it less likely that a sales person will check the buyer's identification.