Student Credit Card – Is It A Bad Or A Good Thing?
If you are in college, then I’m sure that you must have a student credit card or you must be thinking of getting one just as I did when I was in college. It has become so very easy to get one. You can even apply online in a safe and secure environment. I can remember my first day going through the registration process. At one of the tables, there was someone taking registrations for students wishing to apply for credit cards. There were ads all over the place encouraging students to apply for their card. Based on all that I have read about credit cards, I thought it was a good thing to have. I must admit though that one of my main reasons for applying for one was because all of my other peers had one.
Not too long after starting college, I received my first credit card. What a tremendous help this plastic card was! Looking back at it now I cannot imagine what I would done in college without it. My credit card helped me to pay for college tuition, buy books, repair my motorbike but I used to get an one place to another, to pay for pizza when ever I stayed up late at night studying, purchase the Laptop did I needed to get my assignments done, and a whole host of other things.
Looking at those times, the only regrets that I had were on settling to pay the minimum monthly amount on the outstanding balance, and not being more disciplined with my spending. In paying the minimum amount, my credit card debt simply was not going away fast enough. Added to this, because the credit facility was available to me, I squandered it at times. It did not take me long however to realize what I needed to do. My parents always warned me about the enticement of credit. My father would always say, ” Never hang your hat with your hand cannot reach.” They always told me that any money that was borrowed had to be repaid. I knew what I had to do.
The months that followed were a little difficult not from the point of view of having to do without things that I needed, but rather because I had to discipline myself enough to know the difference between my wants and my needs. When I got this right, maintaining my student credit card became easy. I got rid of the bad spending habits, and by doing this I was able to increase monthly payments towards my credit card. Thank God my balance started going down significantly . I graduated from college with first-class honours in Business Administration, and not to mention a pretty healthy credit history and a manageable credit card debt that was well on the way to being liquidated.
Student credit cards are very helpful, but like all things in life you have to manage them properly. You must be disciplined enough not to be swayed by all the free things that I been given away when you use your credit card more often, and only use it when it is absolutely necessary. You must also be disciplined enough to have a very clear plan on how you will manage the repayment of your card.
When many of my friends found themselves in financial difficulty during college, I was able to help them by giving them advice on how to manage their finances – the very same advice that I took myself.. Most of them like me, were able to recover from their initial financial blunder and at the end of college they two had a pretty good credit histories.
At the end of the day, like so many things in life student credit cards are as good as you make them out to be. If you apply for one and your spending habits are bad, and you have no idea how you will repay it, then inevitably you will end up in financial difficulty before graduating. It may even cause you to drop out of college as so many students that I know have done because of poor financial management.
Learn to manage your finances and be disciplined in your spending and a student credit card or any credit card fro that matter, will be no problem whatsoever for you to manage. At the end of it all you would have acquired not just a good college education but also a great credit rating for the future.
