Thursday, December 18, 2014

How Many Credit Cards Should You Have?

How many credit cards do you think a person should carry in their wallet? Should one have an emergency credit card? How do you know when you have hit the point of having too many credit cards?

My personal take is that one should only have one active credit card each month and the balance should be paid off each month. There should be no annual fees or membership fees. The interest rate should be around 10% and one should never borrow cash from a credit card.

If you need a backup credit card for emergencies in case you lose your wallet, that might make sense. It also makes sense to have separate business credit cards to monitor spending in various categories. However, I would say that the value from separating expenses goes down as the cost of maintaining more credit cards goes up.

Kuddos to those who don't even need credit cards. I know several people who don't believe they should own a credit card. They use cold hard cash. What is your take?

Thanks for reading. Until next time...

Read more at www.mint.com. Also check out Do You Like Dave Ramsey’s Snowball Approach?.

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/debt/how-many-credit-cards-should-you-have/, originally written on January 22nd, 2013.

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