Any Cyber Monday deals?

The best deal for me is to buy nothing online. If I do see something on line that is online only I go to that store and order it at the store, pay cash- and when it comes in, I come to pick it up. If I have to pay for it with a credit card I will find it else where. I do not have credit cards and never want one. My thinking on credit cards are if you can't pay cash for it you can't afford it.

 

I am normally just the opposite. I pay for everything that I buy in person using a single credit card then I pay it off in full every month. Just yesterday my wife asked to see every vet bill we had paid in the last 3 months because she thought the vet was being unreasonable. I just went on line and looked at the last few card statements and found out she had never paid them with the card. Because all of our records are in that one place, excepting Paypal payments, I knew for a fact she had never paid them. It is nice to have all bills and payments in one easy to access place.
If you do not have the discipline to always pay off the whole thing, that is an entirely different matter. In that case you had better never charge anything.

 

If you've ever had your CC# stolen and used, then I think you might understand what it's like. Sure the funds are recoverable, in time. However, the CC# I use is not really a credit card at all. It is a Debit Card, and when it's number is stolen, even if the charge doesn't make it through the security network, the card and account is frozen. And the chances are it will happen on a weekend. Imagine not having access to your account for a weekend, even a long weekend. That means no funds available while living out in the sticks as I do! My bank is 65 miles from where I live.

Then comes the hassle of going to the bank and signing the appropriate papers and waiting a week or two for a new card. Of course now you can use your checks, which is even a higher security risk because now whomever has the routing number as well as your account number, not to mention your name, address and potentially drivers license number. In a week or two a new card will arrive in the mail and in a separate mailing will come the pin number. Once you have both in hand, you'll need to activate the card, but also change the pin. The last time this happened to me, the envelope with the pin had been partially opened where you could look inside and see the pin. The envelope with the card had enough pressure applied to it where you could see the number on the outside of the envelope.

Like other members here, I only spend what I have which means debit card or cash only. The debit card is only used on sites I trust explicitly and I'm sorry to say, PayPal is not one of them. It was a toss up at the time whether it was eBay or PayPal that gave up my DC information which was ultimately used elsewhere since they were the only ones who had that information, so I stopped using both all together. I'm not saying anyone shouldn't trust and quit using PayPal or eBay if you use it, but just my experience from about 15 years ago.

I don't have the luxury of making purchases from local stores due to the distance involved. 40 miles to the nearest big box stores, 65 miles to the nearest specialty or hobby type store. So using the internet for a lot of my purchases has become a necessary evil though I do limit the places to only those I trust explicitly. I've been bitten too many times not to proceed with extreme caution, either online or off.

 

We also accept money orders.

 

I've been trying to shop on Target for their extra 15% off, but their web site won't accept orders. It has been overwhelmed since 3PM that I know of. I did order from them earlier today. Wish I could have known what the grandkids wanted when I was first on line.

 

I paid Thomas for some super cedars and it was nice and speedy.

 

I looked around on Amazon a little yesterday, but I really wasn't that impressed with any of the deals. Last year I picked up a Samsung TV for about 40% off, there was nothing even close to that yesterday. I was hoping the Amazon Echo would be a little cheaper, but $30 off the normal price of $180 wasn't enough for me to jump on it.

 

I do the same thing. I have made over $3,000 over the last 3 years with the points on my credit card. If someone is going to hack you, they can get everything through other means such as insurance.

 

Debit cards are actually not as safe to use as credit cards. First of all you are using your own money, secondly they just don't provide as much security as most credit card companies offer.
I've had my credit card (Visa) number stolen (hacked, whatever) three times. In all cases it never cost me a dime and I had a new card within a week, sent directly to my home. On one occasion the credit card company was the ones who notified me about a questionable purchase before I was even aware of it. Most credit card companies actually employ software that tracks your purchases and they will contact you if they see any questionable purchases on your card. An example is if you use your credit card to make a physical purchase in a gas station in Alaska, and in the same hour make a purchase with the same credit card at a gas station in California you card will get flagged by the software and the credit card company will contact you. The software detects that you can't physically be in those two places that quickly. Your IP gets logged any time you make an on line purchase, so they can also tell where you are physically making an on line purchase from.
As far as I'm aware no debit cards offer any protection like that.