This, it's easy to set-up a direct debit to pay off the entire balance every month in the UK. Every major CC provider I've had a card with has supported it.
The entire financial world is designed to exploit people who are not very good with money.
I buy all my groceries on my credit card, basically get a 30-day, interest free-loan on food all year round.
Keeping a close eye on your balance is basic financial responsibility and maintaining situational awareness against the ever looming threat of fraud. It doesn't matter if you operate on a bank account with $10 or $100,000...if you're not actively accounting for your transactions, that's a personal flaw. The way how I see it: if you don't have the discipline to properly account for even the smallest expenses, you'll never be able to sustain wealth at any significant level.
Anecdotally, a recurring pet peeve encountered is when I'm not provided with a receipt for purchases by default. This happens more often than not at fast food joints and gas stations, and when kindly asked for one, I almost always receive a reaction of either dubious entitlement or disgusted inconvenience, highly correlated to which car I happened to take that day. Although this class of expense is in the noise with respect to my financial posture, I still track them with unwaivering vigilance and find it so ironic when a minimum wage cashier who probably struggles to make ends meet every week disrespects that little piece of paper which enables personal accountability. Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings.
I do take photos of larger dining receipts, since errors can be made entering the tip after I’ve left. Usually anything over $75 I’ll take a photo.
Seems unnecessary to me to spend much time on the noise since I can see in aggregate if some behavior like eating out is problematic.
- tip added to receipt when I didn’t leave one
- tip increased by $10
- tip entered as total amount
- entire amount charged twice
- credit card number stolen and used at another fast food chain location for one I sometimes visit
I suppose I could have fallen victim a few times on tiny amounts never knowing, but in total couldn’t be more than $100 over the past several years. I also tip pretty well on smaller bills, so that probably reduces my exposure a bit.
I respect the discipline it takes to audit everything, but for me it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
The latency built into modern tooling exacerbates the issue. Credit card apps, mint, etc are decent for accounting (or allow export to an app that is), but they are so bad for dealing with a tight budget that people resort to debit cards and hand-ledgers (under which I am including manual entry of amounts into an app). A sizable safety margin lets you tolerate latency and gives you access to modern, low-overhead, highly capable tooling. Also, the luxury of choosing your own budgets lets you dodge tons of constraint solving right off the bat.
> Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings.
Then surely you remember the massive cognitive unloading that came when you first built a safety margin, yes?
Even putting all of the above aside, I just don't have much faith in patronizing and finger-wagging as tools for social progress. Even if responsibly consuming credit were trivial at all income levels, I still would still object to business models that encouraged and monetized irresponsibility.