“Anyone that uses a credit card and doesn’t pay it off in full every month deserves to lose big.”
Credit cards should only be used as a form of cash. If you don’t have the cash, you should not use your card.
“If you don’t have the cash, you should not use your card.”
That’s the rule i’ve always lived by.
Everybody hits patches where credit can help; my wife would miss months of work whenever we had a child, and switched from full-time to part-time after the first arrived. When she’d stop working for three months at a clip, we’d use cards; when she went back, we’d pay them down.
Without credit cards this country would have faced a revolution twenty years ago; they allowed us to lose our standard of living gradually enough so that by the time it was noticed we were pre-occupied simply with buying food. For all those years those that couldn’t afford to keep up whatever standard they set simply borrowed to pretend they could. This is also why even now there is pressure on lenders to lend to un-creditworthy people; the ripple effect of people maturing and living within their means has shuttered a lot of restaurants, car dealerships, etc. - anyplace we used to spend “discretionary dollars” (remember that phrase, from the before-time?).