On the contrary, lots of people have got loans, credit cards & lines of credit ranging from $1,000 up into the many millions of $$$, and often these credit facilities sit untouched for years. Having credit available as and when you need it, means that you don't have to sit through a loan application process every time you want to borrow some money!! and, it also means that the cost of borrowing (i.e the interest rate you pay) is usually very low.

Having said that - I do agree with you .... There are many people who find credit cards too much of a temptation! Anyone who falls into that category shouldn't really have a credit card in the first place (but coincidentally, they are the banks' favourite customers!!)

Anyway, I hope I didn't come across as being too critical. If you (or anyone else) doesn't want to have a credit card.....well its none of my business really

cheers

No worries asprilla, you're not the first person to query my lack of credit card - I often get funny looks when I pay for hotel rooms abroad in cash as I have no credit card.

It is only abroad that having no credit card is a pain - at home (Uk or Oz) you can use your local debit card to pay for everything from online shopping to restaurant meals so that's another reason why I've never needed or wanted a credit card.

Well it is a Mastercard and I have given it a try in the UK. Worked fine, but it's not a chip and pin card, so they had to swipe it and I signed the slip. I'm not sure if that would be a problem in some shops. Used it early Saturday afternoon for something costing £4.99, it's been debited from my account already, cost A$11.16, so that's A$2.23:£1. Not a bad rate at all.

I opened a Westpac account while on holiday in Australia.

I'm not a resident (yet), but they gave me a Mastercard debit card!

Not bad at all, these were the median official rates being quoted on Saturday:

Cash rate at 21/2/09
Spend 4.99 British Pound : 11.563 Australian Dollar

Credit Card rate at 21/2/09
Spend 4.99 British Pound : 11.340 Australian Dollar

Can only assume the rate was changing quite a bit hourly.

Hey there we are on a 457 visa and opened up an account with Westpac, they gave us what is called a 'Handycard' this is a debit card and you can use it almost anywhere except for online and on the phone. It has the Cirrus symbol on the back which you will able to use abroad. The also gave us a Visa Credit card too, appently not many banks will give you a credit card on a 457. What you will need to watch out for is charges, try to keep to Westpac ATMs otherwise you will be charged for getting cash out. hope this helps

Thanks guys, good to know I'll be able to use the Westpac Debit Mastercard in the UK when I return there for holidays.

Seems I spoke too soon. Just looked at my bank account again and they've revised the figures - cost now A$11.38 + A$0.11 "conversion fee". So not such a good rate after all......

Before I came to Oz I spent 7 years working for Visa in London, so I'll answer a few of the questions already posted on here. This may be a bit long:

Both Visa and Mastercard have strict rules on "cross border issuing" - i.e. issuing a card to a person who is resident in another country. Normally this is restricted to countries who share borders and currencies, or setting up whole expat card schemes. The bank has to apply to Visa/MC (which are central bodies not afilliated to any single bank) to be allowed to cross border issue. The reason for the inconsistent application of the rules is a misunderstanding by individual bank staff. It may seem inconvenient that you can't set everything up before you arrive, but the overall rules are there to prevent fraud.

The reason banks will ask you to select credit instead of savings when using a Visa/MC debit card is that the bank which issues your card (e.g. ANZ)receives a payment from the retailers bank (e.g Westpac) for every transaction conducted at the retailer. The amount of this payment for credit cards is significantly higher than debit cards. There is no security advantage, that is just a line adopted by the bank to increase their revenue.

Australia does not yet have chip and pin. They have some cards with chips on them, but the banks decided not to implement chip reading terminals (Point of sale readers) as it is expensive and they did not want to spend the money. This is why all cards are still "swiped" in Australia, rather than being "dipped" as they are in the UK.

If you are spending oveseas, the rates that Mastercard and Visa use for foreign currency exchange is signficantly better than any rate you will get anywhere. It's even better than the rate Barclays would get if it was converting £100m sterling to dollars with Citibank. Obviusly you have transaction fees on top of this, but if you want to get sizeable chunks of money out of an overseas ATM (i.e. over $200), the overall cost using your Visa card will be significantly better than going to an exchange bureau.

gjs - it really surprises me that you say Australia doesn't have chip & pin.
I thought they had EFTPOS - is that not the same thing?

Sorry, but it's completely different. Sorry to bore you with a few technical details, but EFTPOS stores all your card information on what is the equivalent of a video tape. Swipe the video tape through a reader and you can read the PIN no and the cardholder's details. Click the link below if you you wish to buy a credit card reader for same day delivery!!!

http://www.barcodesinc.com/cats/credit-card-readers/

Chip and PIN holds the cardholders details on an encrypted microchip which is almost impossible to decipher!

Fortunately card fraud is very low in Australia, but if you had the same infrastructure in the UK as here, you would be almost guarenteed to have your card details compromised at least once each year.

They have the machines to dip the card in, in my area, in QLD. I would have assumed that all of Australia would have had them before QLD, based on what people say about QLD

And I have two Australian cards with chips in them.

I dip my Citibank Visa credit card - that has a chip on it, though it does still work in the swipe machines though.

I have found that getting staff to perform the chip and pin option is nigh on impossible - they usually always print off the slip and thrust a pen at me.

Surely this is the beginning of a wider adoption that will eventually lead to the swipe option being deprecated?


S

http://www.anz.com/aus/personal/cred...ds/default.asp

From October 2006, all new and replaced ANZ Visa credit cards will contain a chip.
All new and replaced ANZ MasterCard credit cards will contain a chip as of July 2008

I couldnt find a picture of the Westpac one, but I did find a 2007 article on Westpac:
These days I am always being asked "Signature or Pin ?"

Whilst you are correct that there are quite a few chip cards out there, hardly any of the termials are chip and pin enabled. I too am always being asked PIN or signature at shops and I don't even have a Credit card with a chip.

In 2007 the major banks in Australia took a conscious decision not move to a mass roll out of chip an PIN until the second half of 2009. What they did do was agree to enable new terminals and some of them started issuing chip cards.