David Bach over at Yahoo Finance has a piece about some lesser-known debit card facts. He points out something I just recently learned - Mastercard/VISA logo cards have the same fraud protection as credit cards. Meaning if your card is stolen, you liability is limited to $50 if you report the card stolen. Some banks do even better and won’t charge you anything in the even your card and/or number is stolen.

I personally use my debit card for everything except Internet purchases and vacation charges. I use it during vacation because I can’t check our bank account every day during vacation like I typically do at home. Since until recently, as I pointed out, I didn’t know you got credit-card like fraud protection on the debit card, I considered it slightly safer. Plus I can group everything together under the 'vacation' heading when doing budgeting. I know many PF bloggers advocate using their rewards credit cards for everything, but I found it too a little too cumbersome. Besides that, my debit card has a cash-back element to it anyway, it’s just not as sweet as some of the credit card rewards programs.

Something else of interest regarding debit cards is that PIN transactions are much less protected by the bank. In other words, if your PIN becomes known along with a stolen card, you liability increases significantly. So it’s probably not such a great idea to write that PIN on the back of the card.