Now I know some financial people will say credit cards are bad and to stay away from them, especially Dave Ramsey. Other financial experts will say they are great and even necessary. I would say I am relatively neutral. So, I am going to give you the good and the bad of them and maybe mention somethings you may have not heard as to explanations for the bad reasons.
To get the easy ones out of the way, they can be expensive. If you forget or cant pay off the balance at the end of the month some cards will swamp you with fees and interest. This can ruin people, especially if you do this a lot. They are good because they provide protection from fraud as opposed to debit cards. You also don’t have to carry a bunch of cash everywhere you go. They also make paying bills easier and provide benefits like points and miles.
All these reasons are fairly well understood by all. If you are smart they can help you get some free stuff from them without costing you anything. They also provide a lot of convenience. They also help you build credit, which will make things like getting an apartment or buying a house easier. The big down side is how they encourage spending, and this is what most that bash on credit cards don’t explain well from what I have seen and read.
When you know that if you spend money you get more points you may be inclined to spend more to get those points. If you have always wanted a expensive watch and realize one day if you do buy it you will get enough points or miles to take that trip finally. You may just make that purchase when you really shouldn’t yet. Hopefully you see what I am getting at.
A different analogy would be going and buying something you don’t need or wouldn’t have bought normally, just because you found a coupon for it. You are not saving money if you were not going to buy it in the first place.
Another big reason is that it is so much easier to spend more than you realize or think with a card instead of cash. This happened to me on the last vacation I went on. I had spent way more on my card than I realized. I was on vacation and did not keep up with the habit of tracking my purchases. When I got home and went to pay off my card I nearly choked. Now I had plenty to still pay it off but it was enough I had to go through and make sure nobody else had stole my card information and was making purchases. Not a fun way to come back from vacation.
Now if I had brought cash along and only used that I could not have possibly done that since you have to hand over a physical thing each time you make a purchase. This also creates the issue of having to carry potentially a lot of cash which could get lost or stolen.
Now I do want to say I am not condemning cards, nor am I encouraging them. I like to think of myself as money smart and disciplined, and I still got caught up in the trap of cards. All I want to do is maybe give people a different point of view so they can decide if cards are right for them. If you can be disciplined enough then I don’t see why you can’t have one. Although, I would say most people would probably struggle to have enough discipline.
Self Nerds 
