My family has raised me to not rely on using credit cards. I have stuck by this and I do not intend on applying for a credit card. When I buy something I have the money in my bank account ready to spend. Just now I was reading some articles at Yahoo Finance and it seems that a few of their articles are written for people who are in trouble with their card debt. Articles on saving money are really just directed to people who are losing money from credit card interest (or other forms of interested related to debt). This only encourages me to continue believing that credit cards are teh devil!
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Fuck the credit system, it is the biggest capitalist scheme in the world. There exists in this country a ursury class made up of land lords, banks, and property developers looking to rocket us all into debt because they make money off our poor financial situations. The fuckers! They would never have to work so long as everyone keeps owing them money.
However, I also can say that any fuck-tard smart enough to rocket themselves into debt buying useless consumer crap and “big boy” toys, probably deserves it. Dumbasses.
Gavin
January 21st, 2007
The only point I’ll make is, oddly enough, no credit is worse than bad credit. I paid off a bunch of debt from college and, while doing so, closed the accounts. This actually hurt my credit score for some unknown reason. At any rate, when you do decide to purchase your first home you’ll want to show a good credit history. The best advice I can give is to get a small credit card that pays airline miles and use it to pay your monthly bills with an automatic payment from your bank account to cover those bills. This way you pay no interest and you’re building great credit.
In the end credit cards are like any other tool. When used properly there’s no issues, but left in the wrong hands they can wreak havoc.
Joe Stump
February 5th, 2007
I also managed to make it this far through life, believing that credit cards are evil, and that spending money you don’t have is not, in general, a good idea. Then I started to get socially ostracized by my coworkers about it, and more recently on a business trip I had some trouble reserving a rental car and paying for the hotel room using just my debit card. This prompted me to actively try to go out and build some credit by getting cards and using them for normal purchases, but then I found out what Joe said above, that no credit is almost equivalent to bad credit. This seemed totally counter-intuitive to me though, given that the average person has some thousands of dollars of debt, whereas I have skirted by for a quarter century never having to spend money I didn’t have, which should mean that I am on way better footing than those people!
Anyway, a good way to jump-start your credit is by getting a corporate card through work (if possible), and having a giant faceless corporation backing you until you have a tradeline going long enough to get a few “real” cards. Either way, for a person who doesn’t plan to ever “use” the credit except as a way of developing trust with lenders in order to buy a house, it all just seems like a silly rain dance.
Seth Kingsley
February 5th, 2007
I think people that understand credit cards are people that understand the real point of them is to build credit. Another way to build credit is to buy a car I hear, but I’m pretty sure you can’t unless you already have some credit.
You also have to realize that much of our country and almost all of our great businesses were made possible by credit systems of some kind.
No doubt it can be abused, and the best way to prevent that is to avoid it, but both represent extremes that don’t necessarily result in the ultimate gain.
Jeff Lindsay
February 5th, 2007
TEH DEVIL?!?!?!
OH NOES!
Is that worse than THE devil???
Tee. Hee. Hee.
Stef
February 16th, 2007