This is a good theory.

If anyone is wondering how to escape this cycle, the solution is pretty straightforward; don’t buy things you cannot afford with cash/debit.

If putting your credit card balance on autopay is scary to you, you probably shouldn’t have a credit card. Also, having a credit card doesn’t mean you can ignore the charges and settle up at the end of the month. Credit is a tool that can be abused and misused like any other tool.

Personally, I’m anti credit in general and don’t have credit cards or a credit score. But I also moved to Europe where credit is not nearly as important as when i lived in the US.

>Personally, I’m anti credit in general and don’t have credit cards or a credit score.

if only people could choose to have or not have a credit score. that would be cool. unfortunately, equifax/transunion/experian are some of the original data vacuums and assign one whether you want one or not.

Yours is also a good theory, but there are plenty of people that find themselves in a situation where income can lag behind expenses.

When it comes to the choice of being responsible with debt or making sure your kid has calories today, there isn’t really a choice in reality.

There is a lot to be said for better financial education, but there is also a lot to be said for services like credit cards that allow someone to smooth out a cash flow issue.

It all seems so obvious until you find yourself in that situation. Most (or many at least) people in debt aren’t stupid or reckless, although they may be ignorant of their options for spending better and for borrowing better.

I strictly use it to accrue points, but general advice is that credit is useful to smooth out the lumpiness of pay cycles, but if you can’t pay the debt back on necessities within the credit cycle, you shouldn’t use it at all.

Since credit is the primary means used for discretionary spending, I firmly believe that the accessibility of quick (but not necessarily cheap) interest allows inflation to go unchecked.

I was deliberately debit-only for years. Someone on a podcast explained why they used credit cards for extra protections from banks beyond debit cards. I don't know the accuracy of what was said, but the show is hosted by three smart people and neither of the other two disagreed that credit cards have more protection than debit cards so I assume it was generally accurate. I got a credit card right away and use it for most purchases and pay it off in full every month.

I sort of agree although I am for credit cards if they help me with deals since I am frugal personally but even I am thinking to just use credit cards of my close cousins/family if they already have one.

I am giving a transcription of the situation in the video[0] but buy now pay later apps have on average 300% apr (yes this is not a joke) and even ask for tips and have so many dark patterns, both these industries are really similar/the one basically.

> She had just switched to this remote job, which was a pay cut, but it let her stay home and care for her son at the time. And then after she went back to her normal job, she actually stopped using Earnin for nearly two years. She got on a stable financial footing. She even bought this house. But housing costs are expensive and for a bunch of complicated reasons, her child support payment is less this year than it was before. And that put Runeda in this really precarious position, where if one thing went wrong, it would completely throw her off financially. And about two weeks ago, that's exactly what happened. My son wakes up really early sometimes, and it was, like, 5:00 in the morning, and I went to try to, like, open an app on my phone, and it wasn't loading, and I was like did they turn my internet off? And I checked the router, and it said your service has been interrupted for nonpayment, and I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? The bill used to be on auto pay, but for some reason wasn't anymore. they told me I had to pay, like, over $200. I had like 50 bucks in my bank account. That was the first domino, and everything fell apart from there. Runeda borrowed $150 from Earnin to pay the internet bill, the $20 reconnection fee and the $6 Earnin fee.

[0]:Billionaires Found a New Way to Steal Your Paycheck:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBI_FLYfwmM