Credit cards are a financial tool that can lead to great rewards and benefits. But if you mishandle them, you can end up facing huge interest costs, fees and damage to your credit.
5 Big Credit Card Mistakes Than Can Lead to Huge Headaches
If you can avoid a few mistakes, you can jump into the world of credit without worry. So be sure to avoid these five credit card mistakes when using and managing your favorite cards.
1. Late and Missed Payments
The first sin of credit cards is missing a payment due date. Late payments lower your credit score and remain on your credit report for seven years. Because they take so long to go away and can’t be easily fixed, you should try to avoid late and missed payments 100% of the time.
Avoiding late credit card payments is easy. Just register your account online through your card issuer’s website (which you should do anyway) and sign up to receive payment-due alerts. You’ll then get an email or text telling you when it’s time to make your monthly payment.
2. Paying Interest
Some credit cards lure you in with 0% APR introductory periods, and banks hope that will lead to you racking up big credit card balances and paying boatloads of interest. You should avoid paying credit card interest if at all possible. It’s a needless expense that provides you with nothing in return. At least with student loans, you get an education out of it. With credit card interest, you are paying more to finance the cost of general spending.
Avoiding interest can be as easy as avoiding late payments. You just have to make sure that your payment is big enough to pay off your balance in full each month. You read that right: If you pay off your bill in full every month before the due date, you won’t owe any interest.
This means you can’t spend more than you earn so you’ll have enough cash left over every month to pay your bill in full. A trick I’ve used to avoid giant surprise credit card bills is paying my card balance in full every payday. I’ve found that aligning my bi-weekly payments with my paychecks makes keeping my balances low much easier.
3. Forgetting Annual Fees
In some cases, signing up for a credit card with an annual fee makes more financial sense than a card with no annual fee. For example, travel and cash back rewards credit cards pay you rewards that are often worth more than the annual fee. In this case, getting a card with an annual fee can be the right move. Sometimes the sign-up bonus alone is worth more than a few years of annual fees combined!
To build and keep a high credit score, it’s best to keep credit accounts open as long as possible. If you keep an old account with an annual fee open, however, it is probably not worth the cost. In these cases, you have a few options to avoid that annual fee.
First, you can call the credit card issuer and ask if there’s a way to get the fee waived. If not, you can either close the card or downgrade it to a similar car with no annual fee. When you downgrade, you often lose the most valuable benefits of a high-end card, but you can avoid the annual fee while keeping your average age of credit.
4. Missed Rewards
If you pay your balances off in full every month, which you should be doing anyway, you’re a great contender for rewards cards. The best credit cards pay you back in cash back. If you are going to pay for something, it might as well pay you.
Let’s say your household has a $64,000 annual budget. Taking out housing and other expenses that can’t easily go on a credit card leaves about $35,000 in annual spending. If you were to use a 2% cash back rewards card and spend that much per year, you could earn $700 per year in cash back. That’s the simplest way to turn your spending into cash in your bank account. The Citi® Double Cash Card offers 1% cash back on each purchase plus 1% when you pay your bill for an effective 2% cash back rate.
If you’re a frequent traveler, you can often get more value per dollar spent than with a cash back credit card. You can do this with a travel rewards credit card such as the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, which awards you points you can use for travel, or you can transfer them to a favorite airline or hotel partner for free and discounted bookings.
5. Spending Like It Doesn’t Count
Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make with a credit card is to spend more than you can afford. This is very common, and the average credit card balance for an American household is $9,654 in 2023, according to WalletHub.
Spending responsibly makes doing almost everything on this list easier. It doesn’t matter if you use cash or a debit card or a credit card: Ultimately you have to pay for every purchase you make. With credit cards, you have an opportunity to spend more, but you’ll end up paying for it eventually — plus interest.
Use Credit Cards To Make Money, Not Lose It
You should always be aware of your own spending and debt management habits. If you have a history of big spending and missed payments, you should probably steer clear of credit cards for regular spending and keep them just for emergencies. But if you have a perfect record, you can use credit cards for good. Just be sure to avoid these five critical credit card mistakes, and you’ll be in great shape.
