Why Your Debit Card Is Ruining Your Finances

Adam Del Duca
9 min readFeb 24, 2022
Photo by Paul Felberbauer on Unsplash

You’re at the store, your cart is full and you’re about to checkout. You open your wallet and have three options for payment: cash, debit or credit, which do you choose? For most people, this decision seems rather inconsequential however making the wrong decision can have repercussions now and into the future which is why, if you chose to spend on debit, you could be ruining your finances!

Let’s face it, if there is one thing people are good at, it’s spending money. Given that life is more expensive these days than ever before, most of us find ourselves in a constant spending spree. We need to buy groceries, pay our bills and even make larger purchases like a car or a home. These are the normal spending habits most of us possess. Then, there are those who spend money for more perverse reasons. They spend money to stay up to date with all the newest electronics, they spend money to show off on social media and they even spend money to soothe the pain they feel when they think about having to go into work the following day. Now, I am not here to judge anyone’s reasons as to why they spend money and the way I see it is that as long as you have the money on hand before you make the purchase then truly things could be worse.

However, if you are going to be spending money, at the very least you should be doing it in the most sensible way possible but unfortunately there are still tons of people who don’t even know the basics of spending the money they’ve worked so hard to earn. Now, before I go into why you probably have the spending habits you do, let’s briefly look at how most people go about paying these days.

Given that more and more people are opting to shop exclusively online rather than actually going into stores, you probably have little clue as to which method of payment people tend to use these days to process their transactions. If I were to ask which method of payment people prefer, I am guessing you would default to debit cards? Did I guess right? When I did my own research on payment methods, I wasn’t surprised to find out that debit transactions make up nearly 50% of all transactions made.

I see it all the time. People walk up to the self-checkout machines, pull out their debit cards and process their transactions and every time I see them do this, I lose a bit…

Adam Del Duca