When you use a debit card to buy gas they put a hold for a few hundred dollars, as if you were filling up the side saddle gas tanks of a huge pickup truck at $6 a gallon instead of filling up a compact. The holds last for days instead of the one minute it takes for me to fill my Honda, or the ten minutes it takes somebody to fill an Escalade.

If it works at all, you can go on a road trip and wind up with enough holds that you have overdraft fees, bouncing checks, fees because you wrote bouncing checks, late fees because of payments that failed, etc.

The "short term loan" from a credit card is not a rip-off, but it means you are laying off risk on them.

If somebody steals your debit card number then they can clean out your bank account and you have little recourse. When I did have my debit card number stolen the bank told me that I had to be careful because they could only change one digit in the number because the rest of it was based on my bank account number.

I told them to turn off debit card transactions on my ATM card.