Likewise in Australia. The only difficulty I've found using a debit card in recent years is when renting a car: with a debit card, they generally want to put a "hold" on the account for a few hundred dollars.

I can't get a credit card anyway since my income isn't high enough, and I wouldn't want one because they charge annual fees in Australia.

Banks in Australia run their own payments system, so it's possible to pay by card without going through Visa / Mastercard. Some cards issued by banks don't even have the Visa / Mastercard affiliation, but I think the Visa / Mastercard debit feature is needed it you want to make card-not-present transactions online.

There are a number of credit cards in Australia that do not charge annual fees. Many require being linked to an active transaction account, but not all.

They generally don't have any kind of linked reward points structure, but that's not a huge loss as most of those got nerfed after the ACCC changes a while back (see elsewhere in these comments).

I see there are some of these around these days, perhaps it wasn't so common last time I was looking which was at least 5 years ago. But at this point, there doesn't seem to be much benefit in having a credit card. I'd also be unlikely to qualify for one, either due to not having a stable income of $20k plus per year, or because I'm not a permanent visa holder in Australia, despite living here for over a decade.

As a Swede, I thought the CC number would be lower. Most people my age never had a credit card.

I do have a Visa DC and a MC CC for redundancy if my bank is down, most people I know doesn't even get why.

You are correct, credit card transactions are about 18% by number and 25% by value.

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/payments-notes-and-...

(Seriously, people, these kind of statistics are extremely easy to find. No need to make them up!)

I have a DC and cc from the same bank.. not sure if it gives much of any redundancy, but it was the best deal on a cc I could find.

In Sweden, the best CC deals are the petrol station branded CCs (Shell/Circle K) as they both give you cash backs, have some insurance, have the standard grace period, and are "free".