> if you ever try to explain how a credit card works to a 14-year-old, you’ll quickly remember just how complicated and strange they are.

Are credit cards really as complicated for most people as this article claims? The explanation I got as a teenager was something like, "Instead of paying with cash you can use credit from a card, then at the end of the month you pay off all of those charges to the bank at once. Technicaly you don't have to pay it off immediately, but if you wait you'll also pay a horrible amount of extra fees; which you never want to do".

It was pretty easy to grok at the time, and is how people should approach credit cards 99.999% of the time.

Once a person gets older and has built up some credit they can look for a card with good rewards, which for most people will just be looking for the highest cash back percent they can get.