#credit cards
Badass trips on a not-so-badass budget.
Many travel blogs are written by people who’ve sold all their possessions and have taken a huge plunge into the world of long-term travel. This can sound expensive at first, but when you consider that you don’t have rent or a car payment in this lifestyle (or much room to carry any possessions), it can actually be very cheap to live this way, provided you can work a little along the way, or do some kind of virtual freelancing or contract work.
I’m not one of those people.
I do have rent to pay, and a car payment, and bills, and the trappings of a fairly typical middle class young urban professional life. I have a cat. I work in a cubicle. I like some amount of routine, and sleeping in my own bed. I have a ladder to climb, that I want to climb.
I also don’t have a ton of free income to spend on travel.
Despite all this, in the past 2 years I’ve managed to visit 9 cities in 4 countries (Colombia, Jordan, Egypt, Spain) and very soon I’ll be off to visit 7 more cities in 3 countries (Italy, Croatia, and Spain again – I love Spain), a 17 day trip; a few weeks after I return, I’m off again on a small trip to Mexico for a wedding. When I’m done, that’s 16 cities, 7 countries, in just 2 years. Not much for the permanent nomad, but a lot for someone who’s expected to be at work by 8:30am every weekday.
When people find out how much I travel, some imagine I must have a lot of spare income or be a trust fund baby. I keep encountering this perception – especially among Americans – that travel is this huge undertaking that is incredibly expensive. Well, it sure can be, if you choose to make it that way. But if you step outside this perception, and do some research, you’ll find that it really doesn’t have to be that way. Travel can be affordable, if you plan for it and prioritize it in your life.
Here’s how I do it:
1. Flights. By far, this can be the single most expensive purchase of your trip. A coach round trip ticket from the US to Europe usually runs anywhere from $700-1200 on average, depending on the season. The trick is: don’t buy your ticket with actual money. Buy it with fake money called points or miles. A few years ago, I strategically opened 2 different credit cards (one an AmEx, one a British Airways Visa) with unusually crazy high enrollment bonuses. Within just a few months’ time I went from 0 miles to 50,000 AmEx points (redeemable for airline miles on at least a 1:1 basis) and 100,000 British Airways miles. Keep in mind, BA is part of the OneWorld alliance, so I can book with other airlines using these miles. In just a few months’ time, with 2 credit cards (that didn’t hurt my credit, by the way) I earned enough miles to take 3 international round trip flights – without ever stepping on an airplane. I got the AmEx points simply for opening the card, and I earned the BA miles after spending $2500 in 3 months, which wasn’t that hard for me because I strategically put ALL my expenses on the card for 3 months.
The trick is knowing which cards to open. These cards usually aren’t well advertised, so you’ll have to do your research. A few good resources to get you started:
Upgrade Unlocked by Chris Guillebeau. This is actually the first resource I used to learn more about travel hacking. If you’re a total newb, as I was, this is the best introduction to the world of frequent flyer miles that exists. But it’s not overly simplistic; there are a ton of insider tricks and tools in here that I haven’t even taken advantage of yet. This guide is the reason I earned 150,000 miles without stepping foot on an airplane.
FrugalTravelGuy.com This is a great blog for those interested in staying up to date on the latest frequent flyer news and credit card offers.
FlyerTalk.com This is a forum for the serious hardcore travel hackers – the credit card “churners” who sometimes earn up to 1 million miles a year doing this. FlyerTalk can be intimidating at first if you’re new to all this, so I’d recommend starting from the top and working your way down.
2. Rooms. Very rarely do I stay in what most Americans think of as a “hotel” when I travel abroad. Many travel hackers and frequent business travelers are loyal to a certain brand of hotel, especially those with their own reward points systems, which earn them free stays (and yes, there are credit cards for this too). These can be a great value and I do participate in a few programs like Hilton HHonors for stateside bookings. For my international trips, however, I prefer everyday price flexibility, so I book a variety of inexpensive, off the beaten path accommodation types – and none of them involve splitting a room with strangers, camping (not counting the bedouin camp I stayed with in Petra, which I did for the experience and not the savings), or couchsurfing. A lot of people associate budget travel with roughing it, but it is possible to be comfortable. In fact, by avoiding the beaten path, I usually have a less expensive, equally as comfortable, and more interesting cultural experience.
Most of my international trips have involved staying at a combination of private rooms at hostels, small independently owned hotels, bed & breakfasts, and private apartments.
Hostelworld.com This room search and booking site will expand your idea of what a hostel can be. Often you’ll find that smaller, inexpensive and independent hotels will list rooms on Hostelworld even if they have a website and brand themselves as a hotel or bed & breakfast. You can search for rooms nearly anywhere in the world, filter by room type (most hostels have private bedrooms, some with private bathrooms and some with shared bathrooms), location (there’s a handy map view), price and more. It’s also low risk - you just pay a small 10% down payment when you book and the rest when you check in. I’ve stayed in some very nice hostels for a fraction of the cost of an equal quality hotel and it’s one of the first places I look when I start planning a trip.
Booking.com This is a rising star in the online travel booking world for hotels. Based in Amsterdam, they are one of my top sources for rooms in Europe (though they offer rooms in several other parts of the world too). Booking.com’s strength is their breadth of rooms available; you can find a variety of low-cost, tiny, independently owned hotels that will be difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. They even offer free cancellation on many rooms. Their pricing also cannot be beat – sometimes I even find rooms that are less expensive than hostels!
Airbnb.com I am a huge fan of this service. A major disruptor to the online travel booking industry, Airbnb offers you the ability to reserve a room in a private apartment directly through someone who lives and is local to the place you’re going. You can book entire apartments or just spare bedrooms, allowing you the choice between having a cozy place all to yourself or staying with – and getting to know– a local, something that may not have happened otherwise (and my most memorable trips have been those in which I connected with locals while I was there). A few other perks can involve more amenities than a budget hostel or hotel may offer, such as the ability to wash your own laundry or cook your own food if you need to (it is an apartment, after all). I travel for 2 weeks at a time when possible (more on that later), and I pack only a carry-on. After a week like that, a washing machine is an unexpectedly welcome blessing. You’ll also get to feel more like a local, even if you never meet your host. You’re staying in a neighborhood, not a commercial, touristy zone. There’s a lot to be said for that. Finally, I love their website. Not only very easy to use and socially integrated, the design is beautiful. I love flipping through the home slideshow of gorgeous apartments on offer. It’s interior design porn at its most authentic – these are real peoples’ homes!
3. Timing and trip length. I would be remiss to say that the above 2 factors are the only methods I use to travel to so many places affordably. The fact is, I can say I fit in 16 cities and 7 countries in 2 years because of how many of those cities and countries I manage to pack into a single trip. In 2011, I did only a 1-week trip to Colombia. In 2012, I did a 17-day trip to Jordan, Egypt, and Spain. This year, I’ll do another 17-day trip (that’s essentially 12 vacation days) to Italy, Croatia, and Spain. Considering all the places within those countries I travel to in each trip, I typically pack up and move on every 2-3 days. That’s not a lot of time in each place! Just enough to visit the major sites, take in the atmosphere, and decide if I’m intrigued enough to return someday to make a longer trip of it.
This pace is not for everyone, but it works for me. I’m restless, and like squeezing every drop out of my precious vacation days. Plus, nothing’s worse than booking 5 days in a place you’ve never been, only to arrive and find out you’re bored after 1 day and it’s too late to make any changes. I intend to see the world, and I have to do it in 2 weeks per year. So, I compromise. It can be a little tiring, but I don’t take these trips necessarily to relax – I take them to recharge in other ways. Travel is my passion and I crave new cultural experiences. My worldview has expanded a little more each time I set foot on US soil again; this is creative fuel to the fire of everything I do, from painting to marketing strategy. That’s why I’m determined to prioritize it, even with a limited budget. For those who’ve also been bitten by the travel bug, you get it. The rest of the world will go on thinking that we’re rich, and I suppose that’s fine.
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UPDATE: Wow, this is officially my most popular blog post ever! Thank you all for reading and sharing with your friends. I received a ton of follow-up questions about specific credit cards and mileage reward programs, and I did my best to answer them in a new article, “How I Fly Around the World for Next to Nothing.” Check it out!
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At the Hotel Oriental Rivoli in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Somewhat fancy, resort-style digs. About $60/night.
Since I posted my recent article How I Afford Travel: Badass Trips On A Not-So-Badass Budget, I’ve received a lot of questions asking me to go into more specifics. I started learning how to do this a few years ago, and since then I’ve successfully taken several international flights that were paid for almost entirely by frequent flyer miles – miles I earned without stepping foot on an airplane. My friends, this little-known, totally legal game is called travel hacking. And I’m happy to share specifics with you – I’ll even share details of my most recent trip, explaining exactly how I did it and how much I paid for my flights.
But before we dive into this, we should identify your travel goals.
Ask yourself: Do you already know where you want to go? Or can you be flexible?
See, there are ultimately 2 ways to approach earning and redeeming miles for free flights.
Strategy 1: Decide where you want to go, and plan accordingly.
Certain airlines are better for certain destinations, and the valuation of miles can vary widely from airline to airline. If you know where you want to go, you can review award charts, award maps, and redemption rates to figure out which airline will give you the best deal. Most airlines are part of an alliance, meaning you can redeem one airline’s miles for flights on another – for example, you can redeem British Airways miles for American Airlines flights because they’re both part of the OneWorld Alliance. Once you know which airline – or which airline alliance – will get you to your preferred destination for the lowest number of miles, you can keep an eye out for valuable cards from those frequent flyer programs (I’ll explain how to find these cards in a few).
Strategy 2: If you’re open-minded, find the best offers and figure out where to go later.
This method is all about choosing the credit card offer that gives you the best sign-up bonus and points per dollar spent, and is part of an alliance that gives you plenty of options – then stockpiling the miles for your future mystery trip. When it’s time to plan your trip, have several options in mind and choose the one that costs the least amount of points. Disclaimer: This doesn’t work if later on you don't want to be flexible (I’ll tell you how this happened to me in a bit).
But, keep in mind there are more ways to earn miles than credit cards.
Everyday online shopping. Many airlines have online shopping malls that allow you to earn miles per dollar spent. You simply login to your account, find the store you want to purchase online from, and click through to that store’s website. Tracking cookies will do the rest. With everything from Walmart, Sears, Kohl’s, and Sephora to higher-end department stores, there are tons of ways to funnel everyday online purchases through an airline’s shopping mall to passively earn tons of miles without ever getting on an airplane. It’s so easy it’s stupid.
EVReward.com. This site is basically Google for shopping rewards. Just type in which store you want to shop and it’ll tell you which reward programs you can use to earn points or miles there.
Travel hacking comes with huge benefits – and I’m not just talking about free flights.
Free stopovers means you can see more places.
When you book reward flights, you can strategically add a stopover for free – and then stay at that stopover location for several days, thereby adding another destination to your trip. When I went to Jordan, Egypt, and Spain, my original flight was from JFK to Sharm El Sheikh (where I went scuba diving in the Red Sea) with a stopover in Amman, which I used as a base when exploring Petra, Jerash, and the Dead Sea. But my return flight was from Cairo to JFK, with a stopover in Madrid. All I had to do was get from Sharm El Sheikh to Cairo, which was a very cheap in-country flight I purchased separately.
You can do this with many airlines. They value your flight from point A (in this case, Cairo) to point B (JFK), and if there is a combination of flights that routes you with a stopover in an amazing location, so be it. It’s your job to research those flights on the airline’s website to find the ones you really want – your stopover will probably have to be in a hub city. Notice also that my roundtrip reward flight included flying to and returning from different cities – I didn’t have to make it back to Sharm to fly home. That flexibility, called Open Jaw, is another benefit of reward flights.
You’re more likely to see places you otherwise might never have.
All of this means you’re opening yourself up to more options than you’d have with a paid flight. If it’s just as easy to fly home from a different city than the one you arrived in, and if it’s cheap to get from that city to the other, why wouldn’t you? And if you’re going with Strategy 2, valuing flexibility over any one destination, when it comes time to book a trip, you wind up researching a variety of amazing trips to see which one makes the most sense – which can lead to some off-the-beaten path places. I’m admittedly something of a Europhile and I’d been dying to go back to Italy since I studied abroad there 7 years ago. Do you think I was itching to get to the Middle East first? No, but the opportunity to visit a part of the world I may never get the chance to again (considering the tumultuous political climate) was too good to pass up. I let flexibility and opportunity take the reigns, and had an amazing experience I’ll never forget.
And you know what? I still made it to Italy on miles the next year. In fact, I’ll use that trip to give you another example of how you can use miles to book flights in creative ways - and I’ll even tell you exactly how much I paid for each flight.
Itinerary: Germany, Italy, Croatia, and Spain
(Yep, Spain again. Did I mention I’m also a bit of Spanophile?)
Here’s how it worked:
Flight 1: DFW to ORD (Chicago) - Spirit Airlines - $118.89.
The best mileage deal that got us to Europe was from ORD to Berlin. I could have also used British Airways miles to get from DFW to Chicago, but it seemed more prudent to save those and shell out for a cheap flight to ORD. It was still significantly cheaper than if we’d purchased the RT US-to-Europe ticket outright. Most international flights leave in the evening, so we had all day to get to ORD. Easy.
Flight 2: ORD (Chicago) to Berlin - AirBerlin 25,000 miles and a $2.50 mileage surcharge fee.
Mileage surcharges are fees that airlines charge in addition to the miles you’re redeeming. They can vary depending on how many miles you want to use, and the airline’s policies. However, sometimes airlines charge much more – like British Airways, in this case.
We weren’t initially planning to go to Germany on this trip. We were concerned primarily with going to Italy and Croatia (in this case we were being a little less flexible – we were dead set on going to Italy and Croatia but the flights weren’t working out perfectly). However, British Airways charged $300+ in mileage surcharges to get us to Europe on BA and most of their OneWorld partners, but for some reason only $2.50 on AirBerlin – but the catch was we had to fly into Berlin. Inter-European flights are so cheap that it was financially more viable to fly into Berlin, then immediately fly to Florence on another ticket. In this case we decided to stay one night in Berlin, but we could have had just a short layover at the airport before heading to Florence if we preferred.
Flight 3: Berlin to Florence. Vueling, paid 92.42 Euros (approx. US $125).
Vueling had the cheapest airfare from Berlin to Florence. Note that we researched the cost of both this and the Spirit flight that got us to Chicago before ever booking our reward flights, to make sure it all still worked out financially in our favor.
Flight 4: Rome to Dubrovnik - Croatia Airlines, paid 1,581 Croatian Kuna (approx US $282).
We agonized over how to get from Italy to Croatia. Despite being just a short crossing of the Adriatic, the flights were quite expensive. Though we could have taken a bus or an overnight ferry, we made a decision to value our time over our money, biting the bullet and taking the Rome-Dubrovnik flight.
It cost almost $300 per person – not ideal. But the story behind this flight is somewhat interesting: though we only needed a one-way, the flight we booked was actually a round trip. Several months later, a flight left from Zagreb for London with our names on the roster, but our butts back home in Dallas. It’s ridiculous that it was cheaper to book a round trip flight that included destinations we had no intention of visiting than it was to simply book a one-way, but that’s the weird, irrational nature of airline pricing.
Flight 5: Dubrovnik to Barcelona - Vueling, paid 98.24 Euros (approx. US $134).
We found good options out of Barcelona, so we decided to tack that onto our trip. Barcelona is one of my favorite cities in the world, so of course I jumped at the chance to spend a few days there at the end of our trip. We paid $134 each for this Vueling flight.
Flight 6: BCN (Barcelona) to DFW - 30,000 miles and a $49.98 mileage surcharge fee.
We actually could have flown out of either Barcelona or Paris for the same amount of miles + fees, but we opted for Barcelona. Fortunately, our itinerary got us back to DFW, through Miami, without having to fork a few more dollars over to Spirit.
So, in the end, this was actually sort of an expensive trip for a travel hacker, just considering flights alone (although we did take 6 of them!). Keep in mind, the flights to and from Europe were only $171.37 (that’s including the paid Spirit flight to get to ORD)! We then spent $541 on inter-European flights (paid with cash, not miles), which was unusually high for us. This is because we went with Strategy 2 – originally accruing miles not knowing everywhere we’d want to go, and then being pretty specific about destinations after the fact. If we’d been less picky about going to Croatia, or willing to travel more slowly within Europe, we could have spent a lot less money.
Hopefully this helps illustrate how you can creatively use reward flights to travel in ways that are not only more cost effective but also more interesting.
If you want more information on how to do this yourself, you’ll need some good resources to get you started.
As I mentioned in How I Afford Travel, I learned the basics in 2010 from Upgrade Unlocked by Chris Guillebeau. Hundreds of thousands of miles earned and several international trips later, I still think it’s the best, most comprehensive, yet least intimidating guide for those who are totally new to this. My best advice to anyone looking to get started as a travel hacker is to pick up Upgrade Unlocked, print that sucker out and dive in.
You can also check out the blogs of well-known travel hackers, including ThePointsGuy.com,FrugalTravelGuy.com, and forums like FlyerTalk.com to get more information.
How to find the best reward credit cards:
Several people have asked if the Upgrade Unlocked covers specific credit cards. Yes, in addition to teaching you about all the different tactics, tricks, and strategies for earning and redeeming miles, it will tell you about the best overall credit cards for travelers. But the more rare bonus offers – like the one that earned me 100,000 British Airways miles – will come and go more quickly. They’re not always advertised by credit card companies, and the best deals only last for a few hours. So how do you find out about them?
There are two options:
1. Know where to look and do the research. There are a couple of mileage bloggers who write about credit card offers, including FrugalTravelGuy.com. The most up-to-date information is on Flyertalk.com, which is where all the pro travel hackers hang out and trade secrets.
2. Take the lazy/busy person’s route. It’s a lot of work to keep up with this stuff. If you’re not up for it, you can instead be alerted to new reward deals as they happen with a notification service like Travel Hacking Cartel. This was started by the same travel hacker who created Upgrade Unlocked. His team of travel hacking experts research new deals (including mistake fares) constantly, alerting you in real time. It’s a paid service — it’ll run you $15 per month — but he guarantees you’ll earn 4 free plane tickets per year.
Not from the United States? As you might have figured out, most of the info out there is for Americans, so you’re probably having a hard time finding information on reward programs for everyone else. Well, about half of the Deal Alerts in the Travel Hacking Cartel are for non-US citizens. I personally don’t know of any other service that alerts you to non-US deals, so if you’re from elsewhere in this great big world and serious about travel hacking, this might be worth checking out.
So there you have it. This is my honest advice for anyone interested in playing the travel hacking and reward credit card game. This whole travel hacking thing can seem intimidating at first, but with a little research and willingness to learn, you can be on your way to the trip of a lifetime for next to nothing. Trust me – it is definitely worth it.
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Luxor, Egypt. 2012
I think I left the teller at the bank genuinely disturbed when I told him that “If I can’t afford it, I just don’t buy it.”
“What about a car? Do you drive a car?” he inquired, his voice toning on the edge of fear.
I told him, “Yeah, I have a vehicle. I bought it used for under $3,000.”
He looked physically pained. “What about if you want to buy some kind of new appliance? Or furniture?” he persisted.
I stared at him blankly. “My couch was $5.00 at Goodwill. Like…I just buy shit cheap or I don’t buy it at all. The only thing in my life that I make payments on is my house, my bills, and my insurance, and that’s split five ways because I have housemates.”
The young man looked horrified? Appalled? And somehow also awed?
This guy couldn’t have been much older than me. But it seemed that he’d never even considered the option before of saving up for something to purchase it outright instead of using a credit card.
Am I the only person in my general age group (just turned 26) who’s never owned a credit card, and who has forgone basic comforts in order to save up for items so you don’t owe money to anyone, like, ever?If you’re living in the US without a credit card at 26, you’re playing with danger.
No credit is viewed as the same as bad credit. Which means you could be denied if you ever do need to rent an apartment or a car. Hospitals and clinics are also less likely to allow payment plan programs for people without good credit.
The best thing you could do at this point is apply for a credit card you’re eligible for and pay a few things (I do gas and groceries myself) with it each month. As long as you keep it to zero balance each month there is no interest and there will be proof of you not having debt (instead of just the absence of debt).
what.
This is legit how it works. The system requires records on you, or else. So you need a credit card and worse, you need to have a record of using it, even if you pay it off every single month. Unfortunately, the formulas used to determine credit score are secret, so we also have people suggesting that your credit rating is helped if every so often you do pay a bit of interest. The whole thing is a complete mess. If you don’t have a credit rating/history, then any loans you manage to get will be at extremely high interest and will require much more effort than they really should.
what
yeaah let me just go get a card that i can’t pay off because capitalism is shit, even if i literally only buy a pack of gum
that’d go wellIf you pay it off in full every month there is no interest. Do what OP is doing but put some of that on your credit card and pay it off every month, and soon you will have a very good credit rating.
you skipped right the fuck over the “can’t pay it off” part huh
like credit cards are just not a viable thing if you’re poor and have shit incomeAnd I’m saying to literally not put anything on it if you can’t buy it in cash. And I’m aware that they fuck over poor people, but yeah, that’s the system that’s in place. This is advice for navigating it, which is how to obtain good credit which helps a lot.
Right like don’t make minimum payments, put your gas on your credit card then that same day pay the credit card company online then don’t worry about it for another month. It’s an absolutely shit system, but in the event of an emergency it’s good to have.
I have had to explain this to a lot of people in my life, but it’s true- no credit is the same as bad credit. What having (and using) the card actually shows is that you are capable of (and actually follow through on) making regular payments: ie, it is proof of having a steady income (even if you do not actually have a steady income). It is showing you reliably can pay for things you purchase, which is what your credit score is all about.
Think of it this way. You have a credit card, which is your credit tracking device. You use the card to tell someone “I will pay for this thing with borrowed money.” They agree to allow you to pay with borrowed money. You then turn around to your credit card company and say “Thank you for allowing me to borrow your money, I will now pay you back with my own money.” (which, if you repay them promptly enough, you can repay them the exact same amount you borrowed, rather than paying them more than you borrowed [which is what interest is])
The credit card company then recognizes that you successfully borrowed their money AND returned it safely, and they pass that information along to credit tracking companies. Each time you do this, you gain credibility. If you do this enough times, you are considered a credible borrower of money, so that if you ever are in a situation where you need to borrow a large sum of money (for example, a mortgage or a car or a hospital bill or whatever), companies with money will look at how well you have returned money in the past, and say Ah yes, this person repays their debts well, so we can lend them our money this time.
So like, do what the above folks are recommending. Get a credit card and use to to reasonably purchase things you already have to buy- put a batch of groceries on the card. Go home (or wherever you can use the interne), pay it off as if you had paid cash in the store for it. There is no extra fee or interest for doing this, and you are leveling up your credibility in case of emergency later on in life.
Ok, here’s a guide for the easiest way to do this.
1. get your first baby credit card with the bank that you already bank with. If it has cashback rewards, even better (that’ll be free money later).
2. set that shit up so it pays the full amount, automatically, every month. you don’t have to remember to go home and pay it off, or worry about it at all. You won’t pay interest.
Your first card, especially if you have no credit, is going to have a small limit. Like $500. This is important: credit companies want you to use a certain percentage of the card every month. This is 1-9%. I usually just go straight 5%. If you use too much, you look like a wild card (even if you pay it off every month) and if you use nothing than you’re not proving to them you can be trusted.
So your first card has a $500 limit. 5% of 500 is $25.
Your goal is to use $25/month.
This is about a tank of gas for me. So once a month, I would fill up with this card, and then put it in the back of my wallet until next month. The payment was made automatically by my bank from one account (debit) to the other (credit). Rinse and repeat. I did this for a year.
Then after a year, my credit had skyrocketed (because I had nothing before, and added this good habit for a year). So I called up my bank and asked for them to increase my limit based on my new credit. I had shown them I was good at borrowing a good amount of money and paying it back on time every time.
The bank increased my limit to $5,500. Like holy shit, at the time I was definitely not expecting that.
So new math. 5% of 5500 is $225. So now instead of gas, I put my cell phone bill ($50), my car insurance ($130), and my dog food automatic order ($40) on it.
The best part is everything is automatic. I keep this card in the back of my wallet permanently; all these bills and the automatic payments are, well, automatic. My credit goes up, I rack up cash back rewards, there’s nothing to it.
And, if I ever get in an emergency, like a vet bill for one of my dogs, I can use that card to pay the $3,000 emergency bill without worrying about whether the place will take my dog if I have no money. I can then go home, change the settings from “pay in full every month” to “pay $X every month” (more than the minimum!) until it’s paid off, and then go back to just my bills. My credit might take a little dip during that time, but will bounce back pretty quickly.
There’s several other factors to credit (hit me up if you want more info) but this was literally the only measure I took for my first year, and my credit went from 525 to 700 in a year. Another year later, I’m now at 753, have a mortgage with a great rate, and can get a monster ass loan if I really need it in case an emergency or hard times fall.
It’s a shitty system of hoops to jump through, but knowing you can use these measures if it comes to it is a good feeling.
Okay but literally read this entire post please!
Take it from someone who was taught that credit cards are evil, you NEED to build up some credit.
I’m 32 and only JUST NOW able to get a card because my fiance helped me do so. I could not get approved before because I didn’t have any credit.
Yes. This. All of this. It is possible to use credit cards as a tool that is useful to you and for the credit card companies to NEVER make a cent off of you. I am in my late 40s, and I’ve had a credit card since I was 18. I have paid the balance in full every single month (except for a 6 month period in my mid-20s when I got a little reckless and vowed never to do that again. Just don’t do that. Have a $0 balance each month!)
I now put almost everything on my credit card and pay it off each month. (I actually log in and pay off my card twice a month, just to keep the balance low, but that’s not necessary.)
I treat my credit card like cash. If there is a charge on the card–then that’s like cash I currently have going out of my wallet. When I log in, the cash is sitting in my bank account ready to go to the credit card company. And bonus – I get airline miles that I can use to visit my family. I have made SO many trips for free because I use credit cards in this way.
My credit score has been over 780 for all of my adult life and it’s usually over 800. I have never had any trouble with credit checks. This works.
