Lindsay Sprinter <zlinw@mcmedia.com.au> wrote:
Like all (most?) people I am limited with what I can do by personal choices. I do not have any kind of plastic money and I do NOT do direct debit. This is because I have had the unfortunate luck to have two of these go astray. The second being the killer as it involved alarge sum of money ($6000) and both financial institutions refused to believe a problem existed and it took over 4 months to correct a problem that was the fault of one of the said institutions.
I solve this to my satisfaction by maintaining a debit card rather than a credit card, and by transferring funds to the card regularly, in amounts that don't exceed what I plan to spend. The effect is to limit the damage that can be caused by erroneous transactions. I also prefer to spend my own money rather than to borrow and then pay it back with interest added.