How Credit Cards are just like your girlfriend?
It’s important to find your right match: Before choosing the right girl, you need to consider your personality and lifestyle. If you are someone who enjoys shopping, a trendy shopaholic girlfriend will be your Ideal partner. If you love partying, it will be better suited that your girl likes to party or you will be facing a lot of nagging and complaints. If you are going through a financial drought, you’d also expect your girlfriend to understand and not expect lavish trips/gifts or your life can become hell.
Similarly, it’s important for you to know which Credit Card will help you and which will make your life difficult. This choice is quite similar to choosing your ideal girlfriend, make the right pick and reap benefits or else pay heavy amounts without any rewards. To take full advantage of a Credit card, select one whose reward structure matches your lifestyle. If you travel a lot, an airline miles card will be helpful. If you love to drive a lot, pick a fuel card. If you are the shopping kind, a cash back/reward point’s card would be the best.
They can Influence your decisions: Your girlfriend has a lot of say in your spending. Most likely scenario is, she is the reason of most of your spending. In a similar manner, Credit card can send you into a spending spree. Temptation to accumulate reward points by buying more through credit card will only lead to more spending in order to redeem those reward points. In both the situations, whether for your girlfriend or chasing rewards you’ll end up buying a lot of stuff, you don’t really need. Don’t let both of them influence your buying decisions and buy an item only, if it is really required.
More is not always merrier: I think, you’ll agree with us when we say that staying loyal to your partner is healthy for your emotional as well as financial wellbeing. Most of you would know by personal experience that maintaining the expenses of one girl alone is quite a struggle. Who would dare and chase two girls? On similar lines, increasing your number of credit cards may not be a smart idea. Credit cards generally come with an annual fee and this fee can be more than the awards you get on the card. Further, more number of cards increase your chance of getting caught in the Credit card trap.
Remember the Important Dates: Never forget your anniversary, your girlfriend’s birthday or else you’ll have to pay a heavy penalty in form of a gift/emotional torture. Like your girlfriend never fails to punish you when you forget important dates; your bank also punishes you every time you are late on your payments. So, never let your payment deadlines slip. When a cardholder is late paying a particular credit card issuer, that card’s interest rate can be raised, often considerably. In India, Interest rate on reward Credit cards is found to go as high as 49% p.a. Thus, if you tend to falter on you payments do not go for a high interest rewards card.
Extra charges: Imagine you take your girlfriend out for a movie but, she also wants to have dinner at a lavish place or you invite your girlfriend to dinner and she brings along a friend. In such a case, you’ll have to bear the extra cost. Similarly, while purchasing for certain products using credit card you may have to pay extra charges. Merchants have the liberty of charging customers different prices based on the payment method. Since merchants have to pay bank a proportion of the sales through credit cards as fees, it is common to charge customers more in case of online/store purchases made by Credit card.
Getting is easy, Complying is difficult: Getting a girlfriend is the easy part (for some at least). Sorry to those, who are still searching for one. But, when you have all the tantrums, lift bags and bear expenses; you realize it’s not all fun and play. It requires understanding, responsibility and determinations to make things work. Similarly, credit cards are not for fun without care. You need to completely understand these tools along with their terms and conditions and comply with them. Use your credit card responsibly and make your payments on time.
