The Beauty and The Sins of The Credit Card

A credit card in my opinion can be both a good and bad financial tool. If you’re a shopaholic and can’t control your expenses or the sort who likes to pay only the minimum of $50 while rolling the rest of the debt to the following month, then you should do the following: pay up all your debts, cut up those cards and sever all your ties with the card company forever!!! Debt can destroy your life if it goes out of control.

On the other hand, if you’re a disciplined spender, that is if you are able to pay all your bills by the end of the interest free period and spend without your means, a credit card can be a very good financial tool. Firstly with a monthly statement, you can have a summary of all your spending nicely printed out for you by the credit card company. In that way you get to monitor your spending easily. By charging everything to your card and paying all your expenses by the due date, your money gets to sit in your bank account for a few extra days and hence earn that extra few days of interest before getting deducted from your account.

The amount of spending in your card also helps you earn points which you can exchange for useful stuff such as a supermarket vouchers which you can use to get useful household stuff or toiletries that you really need. But remember, at the end of it all, you should only spend and charge your expenses to your card if you really need to spend on those items.

Subscription fees for credit cards can be expensive too. Make full use of the free subscription periods to own a credit card. After that you could try to negotiate with the card company if they could waive off the following year’s subscription. Otherwise, simply cancel the card and apply for a new one at another bank that offers free subscriptions for the first or second year.

That’s it for credit cards for now. Feel free to share if there are any more interesting ways to maximize a credit card.