You're out with friends on a shopping trip. You go into a little boutique and find the perfect dress for Saturday night's party but you realise that you don't have enough cash to pay for it. What do your do? Well, you have a couple of choices. You can use your credit card and pay all that interest on the purchase, or you can use your debit card.



While a Visa Debit can be a great compliment to your credit cards, many people are choosing these debit cards as their primary card for purchases and avoiding interest fees and bills. The Visa Debit card works in much the same way as a normal Visa Card but has some advantages that the credit card does not. Although many credit cards offer rewards and incentive programs, the Visa Debit card provides direct access to the funds you have set aside just for purchasing purposes.

As well as keeping your spending in control by limiting you to what you can afford, Visa Debit can also be used for retail transactions over the phone and across the world. It provides the security of not having to carry cash with you at all times in fear of either losing it or it being stolen. Typically you will use a PIN to authorise all purchases but signature can be used as backup when selecting the 'credit' mode. It has the versatility, functionality and security of a credit card and the fee free ease of a debit card.

Many banks promote the added purchase protection and security of Visa when using the CR option on the payment terminal instead of SAV or CHQ. These cards offer a specified number of free transactions per month. However, exceeding this limit could cost you in transaction fees. With the Visa Debit card becoming so widely used, this system could see a change with recent reforms introduced by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Although EFTPOS is widely accepted in Australia, it is not accepted throughout the world. This makes the Visa Debit card superior to EFTPOS because it is accepted at millions of locations throughout the world. EFTPOS has failed to keep up with consumer demands and does not allow merchants to accept EFTPOS cards online.

One of the best features of the Visa Debit card is it's wide acceptance anywhere you see the Visa symbol including overseas, over the phone and online. It is used with the Credit selection instead of cheque or savings. This is because it is processed by the Visa network rather than a local debit card network.

Visa not only offers a Debit card that is pre-paid, but you can also get a Visa Debit that is attached to your bank account and comes directly out of that account. This gives you more versatility when paying for purchases but can leave you spending more than you would with a pre-paid Visa Debit card. The choice is yours, pre-paid Visa Debit or one that is attached to your bank account. Either way, Visa Debit is quickly becoming the premiere debit card to use.