Credit Cards – Friend or Evil?

In the past few months, I keep on hearing from various sources that credit cards are evil and my sources are happy and content to use money instead of credit cards.

I used to feel the same way few years ago before marriage. I didn’t have a single credit card even though the rewards were very attractive. Part of it was my nature of not wanting any kind of debt. After my marriage, I sometimes used to get angry to my husband for using credit card. I don’t want him to spend any of other people’s money (how naive I was?). Now, here I’m taking about good things of using credit card.

If you have a possibly, steady stream of income (a job, for example), you save at least 10% of your savings every month, and you pay your bills before the due dates, you can have a credit card and enjoy various rewards they provide.

We don’t use debt cards at home for most of our expenses. We have two credit cards and we check their reward programs quite often to see what are their special rewards of the month and how can we take advantage of them. Both the cards are quite different from each other. One will give good percentage of cash back for grocery spending and another will give nice cash back for gas/fuel spending.

So, it’s also important to choose the credit card company based on your family needs. One complaint I constantly hear from my friends is that, if we use credit cards we spend a lot. This triggered me to write a post about impulse buying. Don’t we all have to have a budget for each category of spending? We follow a budget system at home and I’d like to have a separate post on that to explain you our system.

But my point is, we cannot complain credit card is the one makes us spend more. It’s us who decide on what to buy and how much to spend.

However, here is an interesting article about late credit card payments from Yahoo! Money.

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