Hi fellow Lions,
Today I wanted to share some unique strategies to use Credit Cards in a positive way, if you have the discipline!
After talking with my friend 
This is the strategy we use to accomplish that!
One of the things that we've applied in our household is a bit of a different mantra on the credit card angle of it than most people. We use credit cards for almost everything! When we go to mom-and-pop shops though, we try to use cash but for everything else like big business type things, fuck 'em we are using cards! The key here is that you need to be able to have self control with this method, and not piss away money but use it responsibly.
We use credit cards that give you rewards that you will actually use. For a while we were using shitty cards like Capital One that uses predatory lending but then you move over to other cards, and we have two, one for personal stuff and one for our small business.
We use the personal one and rack up the rewards miles for our purchases. We get decent rewards on all of our purchases and it counts towards travel credits for things like hotels and other vacation or travel related things except restaurants. We take advantage of this in a few good ways! We have to spend a decent amount of money per month on food and other things that are normal household upkeep stuff, having kids is damn expensive hahaha but it's all worth it in my opinion. So we spend all this money every month that we would likely normally spend anyways (we don't piss money away fruitlessly, trust me. I don't go out buying flashy things, in fact I'm still wearing jeans that have holes in it but I don't want to get new pairs and think I will be repairing them lol) and the points stack up and we enjoy a night or two out a year depending on what we have for points and enjoy a nice beach hotel or something. If you have discipline and don't piss money away, you can make the cards work for you rather than against you! It also helps for unexpected expenses as well, in that you can know that if you've got a good credit limit, and you aren't using a lot of that credit, you don't have to freak out and think if you need to rent a car for the day to get back and forth from work because yours had a flat tire or something, you're covered for a bit until the bill comes in.
One of the things that I've also done in the past few months which I think is significantly important for having a pretty good boost to your credit score, is paying off the card, if you're able to, entirely every month and going one step further doing it twice a month if you can, really has a big boost to the credit score. I used to pay it all off at the very end of the month which did okay but I learned at some point last year that if you pay most of it off in the first 15 days of the month, you get a solid credit boost if you can do that consistently. The credit card companies look at your overall credit utilization in the middle of the month and adjust your score accordingly.
So now I pay off the card twice a month entirely so by the end of the month I've only got a <100$ balance most times because I can't factor in perfectly when charges will finalize. This helps keep interest rates down and I think I haven't paid any interest at all on our cards since I kept consistently paying them off. We earn a bunch of points to do some extra things. The other card for our business, we even do cash back to see how that does and we've gotten a few hundred cash back which is nice! I don't know which one is the better deal yet but we are keeping an eye on the fluctuations of it!
The other added benefit of this method of using a credit card for everything, is that if your credit card info gets stolen, the credit card companies will work pretty hard, a lot harder than a savings bank, to get that squared away and give you a new card and reverse charges. If you get your ATM or Debit card info stolen and money stolen though, there is sadly a decent chance that your bank will say you're shit out of luck and the best they can do is give you a new card. It's a challenging world for sure but we've had great luck and did have our credit card info stolen once but we immediately got an alert and cancelled the card and the person didn't get anything out of us which was great.
Hopefully these strategies help those that live places where credit cards are advertised and used often! It's helped us a lot make our money work for us instead of working against us.
Do not get me wrong though! I love using cash and use it when I find it appropriate. Where I don't find it appropriate though are the big business places. Family owned places we try to use cash as much as we can!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI.
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