We Love Our Debit Cards, But Not our Banks

The recession served as a wake-up call for many of us to get a better handle on our finances, and for a lot of folks that meant replacing one piece of plastic, the credit card, with another, the debit card.
But now, regulatory changes have made those debit cards less of a cash cow for financial institutions. That’s left many banks scrambling to introduce new fees to make up for that lost money.
The problem: Consumers are dead set against the fees, and they don’t necessarily want to start using their credit cards again, either.

Some customers may not be able to use credit cards more because they have lower credit limits than before the recession and credit crunch. Others may have found it easier to keep their spending under control if they use a debit card rather than a credit card, even if they pay the credit card off each month.

And others may find that they just aren’t getting as good of a deal on their credit cards, said Bill Hardekopf, CEO of lowcards.com. His research shows that the average advertised annual percentage rate for a credit card is now 14.05 percent, compared with 11.64 percent when the an earlier set of credit card regulations, known as the CARD Act, was passed in 2009.

Story by Allison Linn