Over the past year or so, I've done my best to try and stop using my credit card for my regular purchases. This is kind of dumb for me to do in the long run, because I have one of those nice Citicards that gives you all kinds of rewards and points for this and that for every bit of money that you spend using your card. The problem is that I get stingy with what is in my bank account. If I could talk myself into using my credit card to make all my purchases to get those rewards points and then pay it off every month, I would be just fine. This just isn't the case with me. It's not that I go and pay the minimum amount due or anything like that, but I just can't fathom paying my card off each month. This brings me to the point of my post, keeping up on your credit...not your credit score necessarily, but rather having money out on credit in your name. Somewhere along the way I read a financial report about how to build and maintain good credit, and one of the top suggestions from whatever the company was that made the study, besides making sure you make your payments on time, was to make sure to always carry a balance. By not having a balance on your card, there is no credit extended to you, and therefore it doesn't look as good on your credit report. This company suggested making one or two purchases each month with your card and then paying the majority of it off, but still making sure to keep some outstanding balance. I guess that it makes some sense, and I tend to be the kind of guy who likes to do just that. I don't ever have a large amount out on my credit card. I tend to use it for big purchases for two reasons. Number one, I like to be able to get the rewards points for those big purchases, and number two, I don't have to have the cash in hand or balance in my checking account depleted right away. I'll have time to pay for the big purchase with my next several paychecks so that it doesn't seem like such a big blow to my finances. Since this is what I tend to do, I always have a couple hundred dollars or so on my credit card that I pay down and then build up a little bit over the next month or so. I'm really curious to see if that is really the way to go, because I remember that quite a while ago I had applied for a second credit card for the purpose of emergency use only. This was back when I was in school for my undergrad, hadn't really had the chance to build up my credit yet, and I didn't have a whole lot of extra money to save up. I thought that the most prudent thing to do would be to have a card for just such a purpose. Anyways, being the financially conscious guy that I am, I never ended up having to use my second emergency card, and within a year or so, I got a letter in the mail from the credit card company instructing me to cut up my card because my account have been cancelled due to non-use. I was really surprised since I didn't realize that such things were commonplace. I didn't want to go through the hassle of applying for another card to have for an emergency, since we all know that it doesn't look too good on your credit report if you have many instances of Company X pulling your credit report to see if they should extend credit to you. Since that time when that card was cancelled, I haven't bothered with a second card.

Anyways, the whole reason that I got thinking about this cancelled card thing from probably four years ago was that I was reading an article saying how credit card companies really can stick it to the consumer, and it's been that way for years. I'm sure that the situation that I've just described about my card misuse wasn't exactly what the writers of this particular article had in mind, but it did kickstart my thinking about the subject. The article explained that the only real control that you have over your credit card is how much you're using it to charge things and how much you pay off each month. Things like service fees, maintenance, and even fluctuating interest rates are in the air much of the time, and are subject to change at the whim of the credit card company that you use. It's nearly one hundred percent out of our hands what happens with things like that. Also, due to the credit report related ramifications and the fact that it's such a pain in the toosh to reapply for cards, it's not like we can just go cancelling cards when the company changes things on us often. We just have to deal with it and hope that the change is in a positive direction for the American consumer.