My strong opinion is that you should not be using your debit card for anything at all whatsoever except for cash withdrawls from the ATM.

I use credit for 100% of all transactions so that there is an abstraction between my money and where I use it.

This is the right answer. Credit cards offer much more protection than debit do. Much safer to use, and in the event of fraud you are out the money on debit until resolution but on credit you’re not.

That’s good advice if you have the credit to get a balance large enough to cover a month’s worth of spending, but not everyone does.

Also it really depends on your bank. I had my debit card details stolen on Simple, had my money back the next day and a new card overnighted.

If you don’t have the credit you can just keep paying the balance as quickly as you need to from your cash accounts (once a week or once every few days). If you have the cash to pay for things, then you have the cash to pay for the credit used to pay for things.

Totally. To put it in programmer terms a credit card is really just a queue that has a penalty for keeping items in the queue too long. You can pay it off as often as you want. The size of the queue in that case isn’t as important. But once you have a larger queue, you have more time/convenience to pay it down.

The only way to build that credit is to begin using it. It takes time. My first card had a $500 limit. Now I regularly get 20k+ limits.

Schwab does have notifications for using the debit card. The issue is that credit card payments and other ACH transactions don't have alerts.

My other accounts notify for every transaction and even the interest credited at the end of the month.

And you can't pay everything with credit cards: landlords, the IRS, utilities, ... there are services like Plastiq but then you have to pay the overhead too.

You're right but I still want a notification whenever my balance changes