How do you use credit cards?

amother

Alyssum

Fri, Dec 13 2024, 3:41 am

If I could do my life over I wouldn’t use credit cards , even with the benefits.
My husband wasn’t careful and once things started spiraling and even when I had discussions with him about it, he did what he wanted, and ended up in debt. Since everything with us is joint financially our overall finances weren’t in my control, I had that feeling of throwing in the towel since it didn’t matter anyway and started being less responsible than is my nature. With kids in the picture it’s easy to lose yourself in buying things you don’t specifically “need”, that’s technically out of your budget.
We’re gotten much better over the years and we’re more comfortable financially (if we’re not reckless, we make what we need each month). Also our most expensive child is grown ans almost out of the house so things have stabilized.

That said, for responsible people credit cards are convenient, and have amazing benefits if used right.

amother

Scarlet

Fri, Dec 13 2024, 5:07 am

synthy wrote:

I use a budgeting app. If I see I can only have 6k income by the end of the month and I’ve already spent 5.5, I know I can’t buy anything that’s not super important.

Which budgeting app do you use?

↑ synthy

Fri, Dec 13 2024, 5:25 am

amother Scarlet wrote:

Which budgeting app do you use?

Monarch. It’s not free but it’s worth every penny for me. Without it I’d have no tally of income vs expenses, and manual budgeting never worked for us.

amother

Junglegreen

Sun, Dec 15 2024, 9:18 am

I use my cc to pay for most things. Then I deduct what I "spent" from my checkbook. I don't spend if I don't have the money in the account. At the end of the month it's easy to pay the cc bill because the money was already 'deducted' from my account. And yes, I do go thru the bill to make sure everything was recorded in my checkbook.

amother

Babyblue

Sun, Dec 15 2024, 9:43 am

I pay for almost everything with my credit card. I pay it off every month so I have no interest charges.

I get points as my major credit card gives me amazon points. I also have an Instacart credit card which gives me 5% discount on everything I buy through Instacart which is a significant savings.

When I was young and stupid I had some credit card debit. Nothing crazy but I realized it was stupid to be paying a lot of money in interest - a purchase could wind up costing 1/3 or more due to interest.

I can't imagine the psychological horror of having high debt as I went through a period when there was no income coming in and we were living off our emergency savings. I would wake up at 3 AM and think about how I would make the mortgage payment.

Luckily I had a relatively modest lifestyle so I was able to eliminate EVERY discretionary expenditure. I remember needing some string to tie up something and discreetly "stealing" it from a plant that was tied up with excess string LOL