Where’s that? Sounds more frustrating than receiving 64 cards to be honest - what if the branch is out of your way/is closed when you get outta work?

Russia. Until recently mail (of snail mail variety) was notoriously unreliable, and mailboxes in row houses are out of the owner's sight and easily breachable

Mailboxes are just as breachable in the US, but the credit card companies and banks seem willing to eat the cost of occasional fraud.

One year I had an epic week of fraud. My credit card number was stolen by someone involved with a local restaurant, the replacement credit card was stolen from my mailbox, and my rent check was stolen from my landlord's mailbox at a completely different address (and successfully cashed!) There was a 3 day period where the only money I had access to was the cash in my wallet because my credit cards, checking account and savings account were all frozen while their account numbers got switched. All the fraud was covered by my bank though.

In the EU, the issue with checks doesn't exist.

SEPA direct debit is the usual setup for places where you'd expect to be able to pay via credit card (regardless of fees), and for e.g. small landlords you just set up a recurring SEPA push transfer (basically like ACH push, but free for normal consumer accounts) to the landlords account.

And for direct debit, you can technically just keep an eye out for unauthorized ones (they need to be shown to your bank 5 days in advance) and tell your bank to stop them before they debit your account. But AFAIK it's the bank(s) that owe you the money, though they can in-turn try to claw it back from whoever debited your account without authorization.

Really, the worst one can do with an IBAN is trolling by spamming transfers to it or signing it up for direct debits (and I'd expect that to cause me at most 1 bank day of no funds, while waiting for my bank to reverse a fraudulent debit). But the impact of the latter is limited (just set up a whitelist with your bank and have them auto-reject the spam), while the former is fairly costly (around 20~30 ct with the accounts that don't do fair-use throttling) and quite risky (harassment and KYC).

A similar experience when younger (and less financially secure!) has lead me to embrace n+1: my emergency fund (the part that isn’t in the coffee can in the freezer) lives in a separate bank than my checking, and I carry an Amex and a Visa as backup and pay with credit at all times.

I haven’t needed the redundancy since then but it’s comforting to know that I have a multi-month cushion to fight with banks if I need one.

Fraud can also be covered by the merchants, if thy didn’t use the chip. That’s why credit card companies are so eager to simply promote sales.

How did someone else cash the cheque, this blows my mind.

Based on the digital image of the check my bank had, they wrote over the payee name rather poorly, then took it to a sketchy payday loan type place.

Between zero problems getting as many cards and accounts as one wants, instant issue virtual cards and NFC/apps on the phones here in Russia, those stories from US sound ridiculous.

I only carry plastic because I find paying with the phone a bit cumbersome and besides the card doesn't have a battery and fits better in a pocket.

I have multiple spares laying around just in case. Sometimes the cats hide one, so what, the branch office is in 15 minutes walking distance.

Internet access is better and much cheaper too.

Maybe because Russia haven't had monstrous incumbents in either place and as a result the market worked as intended.

Was? It still is. Only the government itself uses it to send important documents. Other than that, it's mostly everyone's aliexpress orders.

The one bank that doesn't have branches, Tinkoff, uses courier delivery.

It's definitely not that inconvenient. You choose which branch it should go to, they work on Saturdays, and in my city with like 400k people there's 270 branches to pick from, one of which is surely convenient.

Russia

"internal passport" yeah, that phrase is being appropriated, thanks!

In Ukraine and Russia, your passport for ID and passport for travel may be two separate documents - паспорт and загранпаспорт, the former is probably what Griskha meant by 'internal'.

Yes. What English-speaking world calls "passport" is what in Russian is literally "abroad-passport".

In German it's literally "travel pass"

In English it's literally "pass port" to pass through a port.

It has a long history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_passport

> How do you get one when you're abroad? No idea. You probably don't.

You go to your embassy wherever you are and notarize a document that authorizes a trusted party within the country to deal with the bank (and forward you the plastic). If you don’t need cash, you can issue a non-physical card with a click and use it via Apple Pay.

At least my Polish bank absolutely doesn't have any problem sending me my cards to a foreign address. I have to set it as my main address on the web portal though, request a card, and then it arrives where it should.

Most of the credit cards in my wallet are issued by banks that don't even have a branch. The last time I got a plastic card issued in person was a debit card I got when I was a child.

How many credit cards do you have? And if it's 3+, then why do you have so many?

Just curious.

I have 4 credit cards, plus two visa debit cards.

I have Amex because I trust them most to be on _my_ side instead of the merchants side by default. It's not accepted everywhere though. I use this preferentially anywhere its accepted that seems even the slightest bit sketchy.

I have both a Visa and a MasterCard - each from different banks, because I've been caught out when one bank's network is down and I couldn't pay for stuff or withdraw cash while travelling. I've never experienced a failure of ether Visa or Mastercards backends, but when I decided I needed a second source of credit/debit card at a seperate bank, I figured I may as well make sure I have one of each.

I have debit cards because they're pretty much an automatic part of having an account and a credit card, and also because I keep the credit limits on my cards low intentionally, and can use a debit card or online banking savings account with a much higher daily limit for large purchases.

I have one extra "single purpose" Visa card with a high credit limit and that gets used exclusively for my Apple/Google/AWS/Linode/DigitalOcean accounts. This is for peace of mind that my AppStore/GooglePlay accounts and my hosting accounts will _always_ charge successfully - the credit limit is over 10 times my total monthly spend over those accounts, I could conceivably vanish for a whole year and those would still all get automatically paid.

Definitely 3+

I grab a new one every couple of years when I see one with advantageous terms. I typically only use a couple of them at a time, but I keep the old ones around because: why not? Having more available credit is only a good thing.

I do have heard the view that it is better not to have more than 1 or 2 credit cards, because it is likely to reduce ones credit ratings, and also to avoid the extra card related expenses and charges.

> I do have heard the view that it is better not to have more than 1 or 2 credit cards, because it is likely to reduce ones credit ratings

This is, weirdly, backwards. Your credit rating is improved by having lots of available credit (i.e. lots of credit cards), which keeps your utilization percentage low, and by having a very high number of years on your oldest credit accounts.

> and also to avoid the extra card related expenses and charges.

Many cards have no fees.

Fun story - i still have the first credit account I got when I first went to college (originally cosigned by my parents with like a $400 monthly limit, eventually became solely my own and with a proper credit limit). Many years later (after getting a much better credit card that became my daily driver) I used that first card a couple of times for whatever reason and completely forgot to pay it off until six months later, when I paid it in full. That account is now still (> 8 years later) restricted with available credit of $0, but remains a favorable part of my credit score by being my oldest available credit line by many years (the non payment dings appear to have dropped off from my credit rating) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[edit: i just checked and that card currently has an available credit of $-0.05 which I guess means I'm giving the bank a $0.05 credit line!?]

Having a high number of applications in a short period of time will slightly decrease one’s credit score. Staying at or below 1-2 per year usually hasn’t swing mine more than a few of points. Even with a high number of inquiries, this factor only accounts for 10% of the most commonly used FICO score.

Debt burden and length of credit history are, together, 45% of someone’s score, and these are both improved by having a lot of old unused credit cards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_S...

Having more credit cards/credit is not a bad thing... closing accounts on the other hand can drop your credit rating because your average age of credit goes down.

>I keep the old ones around because: why not? Having more available credit is only a good thing.

Also because closing accounts can negatively impact your score (by reducing your average age of accounts)

If they're in the US, a lot of financially smart and motivated people can play Credit Card games to maximize on their miles / rewards for purchases such as like 3% cash back on some purchases.

I have a friend who's honeymoon was completely paid - first class flights and ~three weeks worth of all inclusive 5 star hotels/resorts - all on points.

His father ran his entire construction company paying everything he could on the highest rewards based credit card available at the time. He apparently put over 12 million through it in two years. (I suspect it was about an order of magnitude lower than 3% cashback on that, but it was still a nice chunk of honeymoon and travel bills paid "for free", or more accurately by the bank and their merchants, and probably at least somewhat passed on to the construction company's customers in prices high enough to cover the credit card rewards scheme...)

Not the person you're replying to, but I have: my main one, one for the railway company that my gym is associated with (needed for that gym membership), one for a theatre membership, one that reduces my bank account's annual fee, a UnionPay card for use in China, one with good foreign exchange rates and one from my previous country.