Credit card personal discovery

jonesMUFCforever

Seperate accounts!
My wife is useless with money her take home is similar to mine and she only pays a fraction of the bills but she's alaways o/d before payday.
I've given up with her now she can do what she wants and I'll continue to save.

ReportInvestor

:rotfl:

I knew I'd find your achilles heel somewhere, ej .

My "project" is designed to give back control to both me and my partner. And to help educate her in the process . In an atmosphere of mutual respect, of course.

sofa_surfer

Whatever amount I spend on the credit card is transferred daily from my current account to the higher rate e-savings account attached to it. Come statement day, the entire amount is transferred back and the statement is paid. This way the only amount I need to know is the balance on my current account. This way the only amount I need to know is my CA balance. Worked fine so far. As for the budgeting, I have fair idea of what my monthly outgoings are, anything extra is dealt on a case by case basis.

sicker

My diary is a spread sheet on my computer covering all my finacial dealings.

John

Milarky

I'd take the opposite view of credit and debit cards to RI. A credit card acts as a 'spending collector' for all your monthly purchases (let's ignore large infrequent items for the time being.) Once a month an aggregated sum is asked for - usually 25 days hence (21 days allowing for the receipt of the statement itself.) This is immediately useful in two ways:

Shows how much you spend in a month and on what;
-before specific software and the internet, this was about as much detail of personal finances as one could expect (and the information was 'free'!)

Transfers as one collection item only back onto your bank account;
-thus the process of 'knowing' your bank balance accurately is simplied - if you made 'n' transactions with the credit card, you lose 'n-1' transactions from your current account in effect.

In my experience - and this was before debit cards which are olny about 10 years old remember - credit cards were an ideal adjunct to a bank account which allowed for better budgeting and knowledge of day to day balance. This was particularly so in the 'one card' era.

In that respect RI has highlighted how things are that much more complicated than they need to be - but then that is the price of stoozing (etc) - think of how many minimum payments have to go through accounts these days! I agree that it's now more difficult to justify the arbitrary use of debit and credit card combination and can see that, once given up, only using the one card instead must feel liberating.

[Now, perhaps if annual fees start to spread rapidly through the credit card business we will all quickly converge to this postion also?]

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sofa_surfer's approach looks similar to Andy's (post #13) except that it attracts interest as well as the cashback.

Both leave an spending "trail" in the current account and keep the current account balance right up to date.

To Milarky
I did experiment once with just petrol & supermarket bills on the credit card to aid budgeting in a way similar to the one you are suggesting but then slipped into "get as much cashback as you can" mode when the 2% deals came in.

You make a good, up to date point, about the extra problems of budgeting if you have several credit cards on the go.

The changed situation for me is this facility to download your current account details for easy, very detailed budgeting purposes - which wasn't available in the early credit card era you describe.

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Thanks to everyone here who has taken the trouble to read my heresy / anathema.

All your replies have been appreciated and helped my understanding.

With Christmas coming up, will I be able to steel myself to keep away from those 3% cashback offers ?

lswwong

Go on .... be a devil!

Phoenix79_2

A moneysaving devil!