Great minds think like me...

[Nutria]

https://dqydj.com/the-perfect-credit-card-spending-strategy/

A credit card has two main functions:

• Credit Cards allow you to purchase goods and services today and allow you to pay for them later (the dangerous credit card strategy)
• Credit Cards increase your liquidity by allowing you to spend money on days you do not collect a paycheck (the ideal credit card strategy)

Most people don’t collect a paycheck every day. Most people also have a good idea how much money they make in a month. If you are one of those people (and I imagine most of you are) you can use one simple strategy – pay for things on your credit card (preferably a rewards card), and pay the balance at the end of the month. Think about it – it is much simpler to have a credit card (which by the way protects you from fraud, is easier to carry than cash, and, if you use a rewards card, even gives you rewards to use it) than to withdraw a huge amount of money at the beginning of each month, spending it down on each purchase.

The only difference is that I pay our CC bill every Sunday (which I did not 30 minutes ago).

[disneysteve]

There are a couple of other related benefits of using credit cards.

1. I only have one transaction to record each month instead of a couple dozen. I would go nuts if every time I bought anything or paid for anything, I had to record that transaction. I just looked at our 2 main credit card statements from last month. There are a total of 48 transactions. It's nearly 60 with our 2 Discover cards. I know I'm old fashioned but I still keep a paper registry for our checking account and record everything by hand and balance the account each month. That would be far more difficult if I switched to debit.

2. Debit cards might do this too. I honestly don't know. But our credit cards give us year-end statements that break down all of our charges by category (auto, travel, dining, etc.). It's a very useful financial tool to review that summary each year. It's great for budgeting purposes.

[Nutria]

1. I only have one transaction to record each month instead of a couple dozen. I would go nuts if every time I bought anything or paid for anything, I had to record that transaction. I just looked at our 2 main credit card statements from last month. There are a total of 48 transactions. It's nearly 60 with our 2 Discover cards. I know I'm old fashioned but I still keep a paper registry for our checking account and record everything by hand and balance the account each month. That would be far more difficult if I switched to debit.

I keep the check register on a spreadsheet, and "pre-fill" most expenses, because I know when and how much they'll be.

The rest aren't a chore (for me) if I keep up with them every couple of days.

our credit cards give us year-end statements that break down all of our charges by category (auto, travel, dining, etc.). It's a very useful financial tool to review that summary each year. It's great for budgeting purposes.

Last time I looked at my EOY breakdown, the automatic category placement was pretty mangled, especially since we spend so much a Wally World.

(Also, monthly numbers are more important to us, and year end budget numbers are uninteresting.)

[disneysteve]

(Also, monthly numbers are more important to us, and year end budget numbers are uninteresting.)

We don't do actual budgeting so for us, the summary is a good overview to see where things stand and how we made out for the year. Comparing it to the prior year is useful.