If you have a credit card or have ever used one, then you must be aware of how tempting it is t keep spending even when you shouldn’t. And it’s for this reason that you risk having bad credit. You should, however, try to avoid this at all cost because once you get yourself in this mess, it could take you months and probably years to get yourself back to financial stability. So why not avoid bad debts from the start? Sounds like a good idea to you? Here is what you should do;
Buy Only What You Can Pay For
By all means, shun from swiping your credit card for items you can’t afford or don’t even need. If you didn’t carry enough cash to pay for them, then it means you hadn’t even planned to buy them. So save yourself from unnecessary costs by avoiding impulse buying at all costs.
Set Up An Emergency Fund
There’s no one who can tell for sure what will happen tomorrow. So set aside some cash every month to cater for emergency situations such as car breakdowns, accidents, and medical bills. These are among the top list of reasons as to why most people get credit cards in the first place. Easy access to cash during such moments will help you avoid huge credit card expenditures.
Make Your Credit Card Payments
By all means, avoid postponing those monthly credit card payments. In fact, they should be among your number one priority after other billings. Remember, even if you postpone it, you’re the one who’s going to pay it, but only at a much higher rate. And it might prove difficult to pay on time, thus landing you into a bad credit score. In such a situation, among the valid financial help you could get would be from the various bad credit loans guaranteed approval lenders, which will help you redeem the situation. This is because, with them, you won’t suffer embarrassment and rejections. And you could slowly increase your credit score. But ensure you learn from the situation.
Avoid Lending Out Your Credit Card
No matter how much you care for a person and how much in love you feel you are, you won’t have control over how much money they will spend on your credit card when you lend it to them. Money is a sensitive topic and very tempting. So they can promise you one thing but do the complete opposite. And in such a situation, it’s you who will suffer the repayment consequences. If you must give out, be there to make sure they spend only what you agreed upon.
Have Few Credit Cards
You don’t have to get a credit card for each person in your house. In fact, one is enough and if you must, limit them to at most three. Remember, the more you have, the more you will want to spend forgetting that you’re the same person paying them off. Another trick is to carry only one credit carry in your wallet or whenever you head out.
Having a credit card is a good thing as it can help you out when in a fix. But it’s the careless use of it that can easily put you into bad debt. To avoid this, minimize your expenses, have an emergency fund in place, make timely payments and have only one in your wallet.
Henry Lares is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post. In regards to academics, Henry earned an engineering degree from Apex Technical School. Henry has a passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
