Credit cards and credit in general, are, of course, a form of slavery. Or better said, they can be.
There are good reasons for using them.
Airline tickets: if you pay cash and the airline goes broke before you fly somewhere or fly back, if you pay cash, you are screwed: you will have to stand in line (figuritively) for many months to be repaid. This will likely never happen, as airlines are used as cash cows by weenies like Carl Icahn (who bought TWA, diddled its employees and robbed its assets). If you use a debirt card, same thing.
If you buy something on e-bay or some mailorder merchant or have something repaired and the item is junk or never arrives or stays fixed, if you paid with a credit card, you can just sent the damned thing back and refuse to pay. I once bought a tank of gasoline (back when I bought gasoline) and it turned out to be water. I should have charged it, but instead I paid cash, and i took a long time for the convenience store to bill the supplier and the supplier to bill its insurance company.
Discovercard has a nasty habit of telling you the bill is due on the 4th, and you send payment when received, perhaps on the 20th, and then they tell you it didn't arrive until the 5th and you owe a $29.95 fee for late payment on a charge of $39, and they won't refund this. I canceled my card, and every month they would call me and ask why and didn't I want it back. I told them, but apparently my explanation that they were shameless thieves and liars did not seem reasonable to them. The cards that are offered to you in special mail deals are far more likely to suck than the ones recommended by Kiplingers or Money magazines you have to apply for. Bank One is a particularly nasty bunch.
Modern business will not function well without credit. In 1950 Egypt was more prosperous than South Korea or Taiwan. Now both Taiwan and Korea have first world economies, and Egypt is a foul slum for most of its people. This is mostly due to the fact that Egypt is a Muslim country and credit is not used.
Islam is backward in its view of credit and will remain so until it chooses to ignore the prohibition against borrowing at interest. No one has any motive to lend money to a stranger than interest. Large ventures are difficult for even large families to finance.
Shiites, who believe in modifying the rules a bit, are more likely than Sunnis, who won't, in achieving economic development.
Christianity bans the charging of interest, by the way: it is a sin to lend money at interest, called usury.
I pay off all my cards by the day due, except in the rare occasion that the service or product was defective or not received.
If you get slapped with any fee, always call the company immediately, or they will mark you as a sucker and slap you with more fees.
If they tell you they are changing the terms of the credit card, pay them off and refuse to accept the new terms if they are not tolerable for you. Cut the damned thing up and mail the pieces back with a letter.
Check your credit reports yearly with the three bureaus for free. Make sure that you have the FREE site (which won't tell you your credit score) and not the others who want to stick you for $19.95 a month for this.
