Student Credit Cards
So it’s frosh week on campus and you are being offered everything from free t-shirts and baseball caps to student credit cards.
Do you take all the free merchandise that you can get your hands on?
And what about those student credit cards? Are they really free or do they come with a big invisible price tag.
On the one hand, there are many benefits to getting a student credit card. With them you can start building your credit, learn how to manage and budget your money and buy big ticket items that you need for college.
There are also small perks: you can easily book plane and train tickets to get home to visit your family or collect affinity points to get free stuff.
And it is always good to have a credit card in case of emergencies.
But there are serious disadvantages and possible consequences to charging it.
With its shiny plastic finish, credit cards don’t resemble cold, hard cash and you might be tempted to spend money that you don’t really have.
It’s easy to buy that new pair of kicks you’ve been eyeing, when you don’t have to fork over the cash up front. But big ticket items can really add up if you’re not careful and before you know it you might not be able to pay off your monthly credit card bill.
Even if you pay the minimum, you’ll have to pay serious interest when the year’s up. And if you don’t have the cash to pay it back at all, you can end up having bad credit. That could ruin you for life—you won’t be able to get loans for cars or loans to buy a house. They even check credit when you’re getting a cell phone and if yours is poor you may have to put a down payment of $500.
Learning how to manage money is a definite part of growing up. And like anything new that you are learning, you are definitely bound to make mistakes along the way.
But misusing your student credit card is a high price to pay. So if you are going to get a student credit card, remember nothing really comes free in life.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under The Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I found your site on Google and read a few of your other entires. Nice Stuff. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.