I disagree with many financial experts in that I believe that credit cards are a good thing to have if you are responsible with your money.  It’s all about tracking your spending.  In fact, I have a harder time controlling my spending when I use cash since I can’t track it in my Financial Aggregation Tool.  Here are my Fave 5 reasons that I have a credit card.

5. Float  your debt
I pay my balance in full every month so I don’t accrue any interest.  In essence, I am getting free interest on that money every month.  For example, if I pay a $100 electric bill every month with my credit card, I can keep an extra $100 in a Certificate of Deposit or Money Market account to earn interest.

4. Get gifts/rewards for signing up
From cash to free toasters many cards offer some sort of incentive to sign up.  As long as you don’t go crazy signing up for every card that has some kind of gift with it you can use this to your advantage.

3. Save on interest
May cards have special terms on interest.  0% or reduced interest rates… some are promotional and some cards have a fixed low interest rate.  Use this in conjunction with Reason 1 (float) and you can get some extra interest.  Just make sure you read all the fine print and have the money to pay in full when the promotion period ends.

2. Get a reward for making purchases
Get cash/points/rewards for spending.  If you’re going to make a purchase anyway why not get an instant 1% discount.  Just don’t go overboard with chasing points.

1. Build your credit for big purchases
And the NUMBER 1 reason for getting a credit card is to build your credit.  Some day you may need financing.  The deal specialist does not believe in financing for cars (unless you can get <3%), but someday you will want to buy a house.  Easiest way to build up credit is to get a credit card.

Even though I’m typically very comfortable with technology, I felt like I was flying an airplane using that weird trading tool (after the tutorial and doing a few practice trades I felt a bit better about it).  I opted to do a EUR/USD trade since that was supposedly the least volatile currency pair.  I looked at the trading chart and looked like (based on my probably not so good intuition) that EUR had dropped quite a bit during the day and was about to rebound.

So I set a limit buy order at the current price and crossed my fingers.  It went through instantaneously and then I set up a limit sell order a few ticks above my buy order amount and recrossed my fingers.  I looked at the thing for a bit and decided to not stare at the thing, my heart was beating 1000 beats a minute.  Good time for a bathroom break…

Got back from the bathroom and good news, the trade went through.  Net profit $6!!!  Hopefully, I get my $200 bonus soon, but I’m glad I went through this experience.  The FOREX is a bit volatile for me (I think I prefer the casinos), but I’m going to educate myself a bit more on the topic.

Questions to ask at an interview