posts tagged with 'banking'
bad credit user
I've had one credit card or another for more than 15 years, and the whole time I don't think I've ever carried a balance. Well, not on purpose: there were a few times when I accidentally paid less than I owed—strangely, I never get any interest payments from the company the times I accidentally paid too much—and more than a few times when I accidentally forgot to pay my bill at all. In fact, I can safely say that over the years I've paid less than $20 in credit card interest and several hundred dollars of late fees. Clearly, I'm doing it wrong.
Just as clearly, I shouldn't actually be using a credit card at all. If I can always pay the balance at the end of the month, then most likely I don't need credit; I might as well just pay for whatever it is the old fashioned way, with my debit card. The only reason I haven't stopped carrying a credit card before now is the lingering worry that I might someday for some reason have to pay for something important, something that costs more money than I have in my bank account at the moment. Of course, I'm not sure what the next step would be in that scenario. Sell an organ? Fake my death and flee the country? Cancel my cell data plan?! I can't imagine. I suppose the normal-person thing to do would be to pay the minimum every month while the interest kept piling up, but that seems as desperate to me as the organ thing.
Leah manages without a credit card; for some reason I have three. People keep telling me that it'll do bad things to my credit rating if I cancel any of them (not that I should care too much about that, since I have this debilitating fear of indebtedness thing going on). I also worry about making the issuing banks feel sad and rejected; it's not like they did anything wrong! Oh wait, yes they did. But not to me—nothing beyond what I let them do myself when I forgot to give them back their money. But no more! My wallet is now empty of credit cards. Now I have one less way to not buy anything, and I'll save even more money than I did before. Especially in late fees.