[swartkrans]

Yeah there are laws, but you have to catch it, and you have to report it and sometimes you don't realize you've been defrauded until months later. Hackers in my experience don't empty your account out, they charge $30 here, $19.99 here, sign up for this thing for a monthly charge of $9 you didn't realize. My time and stress costs me. And you can lose money.

It's best to just not have to deal with it. My credit card number has been put up for sale twice now, twice. Because I used it at a Target and a Home Depot. Ok, I just don't want to go through that again. I don't care if there are laws, if I use cash, I'll be fine. It's no problem, cash is accepted everywhere. I'm not likely to be mugged where I live and I don't carry a lot of money.

[ericd]

The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger than the concentrated pain of replacing a credit card once a year. I make significantly more than $30 here and $20 there on rewards - on the order of $500+/year

Sign up for Mint, and quickly scan all of your transactions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. It's a good idea anyway, so that you can easily account and keep track of how well you're doing at saving.

[swartkrans]

> The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger

I have not found this to be the case.

> Sign up for Mint

I don't intend to increase the available surface area for attacks by giving my credit information to a third party. Nor do I need this kind of a monthly or bi-monthly hassle.

[ericd]

Eh, I don't view it as a hassle - I view it as a progress check. My savings is important to my future, and checking the budgets, etc. helps keep me on track.

Point taken on the attack surface area, that's definitely something I've always been worried about, and I have no counter.