War on Credit Cards appears in the 63rd Carnival of Debt Reduction with our post titled Don’t Just Make Minimum Payments.

If you have a credit card and a checking account with the same bank, you may be able to link the two and use your credit card as protection against any overdrafts. Overdraft fees getting downright ridiculous lately ($30 a pop or more sometimes) and there are sometimes other options than using your credit card, but it’s something to look into. Apparently Wachovia has been offering this since 1992 and by using your credit card you incur a fee of $10 instead of the usual $2309482034923 fee.

The benefit of having overdraft protection in general is that your check will get cashed no matter what, without it you run the risk of having the check bounced and then you’ll have to face even more headaches down the road. If you’re seriously considering protection by way of credit card, investigate the fees associated with the overdraft protection service.

Oh man oh man, please don’t ever just make minimum payments on your credit card bill unless you want to be paying for that cheeseburger for the next ten years. According to the calculator at Bankrate, if you had a $1000 credit card bill and only made the minimum payment of 5% each billing cycle, it would take seventy months (five years and 10 months!) to completely pay off the bill. You would also have paid $382.47 in interest, or a whopping 38.25% premium onto the existing bill.

The minimum payment might seem nice (only paying $50 a month on something that costs $1,000) but in the long run it’s you who will be paying… 38% more than what you were supposed to.

You know that ATM card you received from [insert bank name here] that doubles as a debit card? Don’t use it like a credit card - use it like an ATM card. See, debit cards are not your friends. They are not your friends because many don’t give you any sort of cash back benefit (Bank of America does have a Keep The Change program), most will charge you high fees if you over charge your balance, and in general the protections in place aren’t as good as credit cards.

No Cashback

Cashback is the number one financial reason you should be using a credit card whether it’s a mundane 1% back on everything of a lucrative 5% cash back on gasoline and supermarket purchases, a percentage back is better than getting absolutely nothing for swiping. Most debit cards don’t have a cash back benefit and so in this arena a debit card loses to a credit card.

Protections

In the past, debit cards didn’t have the same level of limited fraud liability ($50) and their fraud prevention resources were far weaker than credit cards, that has since changed but there still is a disparity, especially if you have a small regional bank. Not only that but if someone steals your card, they have access to all of your money, not an illusory “credit limit.” Lastly, because of the limited fraud resources, problems take much longer to solve and instead of that illusory “credit limit” being frozen, we’re talking your everyday funds are frozen. It’s a raw deal but unavoidable.

Take the cash back, take the fraud protection, use that debit card as an ATM card, nothing more.

Welcome welcome! War On Credit Cards is a website designed to you, the consumer, fight back against the credit cards. I don’t mean cut them up and throw them away, I don’t mean cancel the cards and never use credit again, I mean to teach you and arm you with the weapons you need to earn money from your credit cards. I’ll teach you how to utilize 0% balance transfers to earn interest off free money from companies like Discover and Citi. I’ll teach you how to take advantage of free gift card offers with your first purchases from many of these cards. I will teach all of this to you absolutely free.

Why am I doing this? It’s because I’ve been doing this for years, I’ve earned thousands from the credit card companies and now I’m going to share all of it with you.