How Can You Monitor Your Credit Card Spending?

If you are in debt, there is something that you are doing that is out of whack. How would it feel to be debt free? The only debt you should carry is your mortgage. Everything else is just extra weight that is being pulled around. Do you really want that stress?

One helpful article from www.indexcreditcards.com shows how to track credit card spending. In fact, if you pay for a product or service to help you with this, it is probably well worth it, since obviously something you are doing isn't working. However, this is much like a gym membership. If you purchase it and then only go once a month, you are wasting your money. Oh, wait, that might actually be good for monitoring your credit card spending.

How often do you check the balances on your credit card?

I guess being completely debt free should be a precursor to purchasing a home. For other guidelines check out: 3 Easy Guidelines to Purchasing Your First Home.

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/debt/how-can-you-monitor-your-credit-card-spending/, originally written on January 23rd, 2013.

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.