Please tear down and rebuild these sloppy and fat credit bureaus. At the very least, I hope you guys provide some solid competition for them to shape themselves up.
Please tear down and rebuild these sloppy and fat credit bureaus. At the very least, I hope you guys provide some solid competition for them to shape themselves up.
Solution: pay in full right before the month rolls over. I've already had two credit limit raises after doing this... but why should I have to? Why should I have to arbitrarily change habits that have nothing to do with good finance just to appease credit bureaus that aren't doing a good job to begin with?
Are you afraid of not getting a good rate when it's time to get a mortgage? I've often heard the anecdotes about without debt but no credit card history getting turned down for loans, but I've also wondered if it's actually true.
You're right in that credit cards are still useful if you use them right, though. There are certain protections (chargebacks) plus the benefits you note. Credit card companies are like casinos--they give you tons of benefits if you use them hoping you'll go on tilt and waste tons of money. If you're smart, sometimes you can beat them at their game.
Following your analogy, the majority of people are probably better off financially by not going to Vegas at all.
Oh, and you should make sure you never spend more on your credit card than you have in cash to pay it off; but you should have at least several months' expenses sitting around in cash anyway, so this shouldn't be an issue as long as you have good financial habits.
For an average-income person with good financial habits a 1% cashback credit card is a net win of maybe two hundred dollars a year. Not a huge deal, but the best financial habit you can have is not saying no to small savings.
Still, it's a lot easier to remember to pay a bill on time every month than it is to play optimal-strategy blackjack for hours with no mistakes.
The analogy holds, but it's not all that good an analogy since there's a severe difference in the difficulty and the risk/reward ratio. Some things are better explained in their own terms than via an analogy.