Get a Credit Card, Build Up Credit Score

You might wonder why you even need a credit card. Cash works just fine for you, and if you don’t have any in your wallet then you can just pull out your debit card, and then get some cash back. It’s convenient not to have to flash your ID all the time, not that you’re being shady, it’s just convenient is all. And your debit card can function just like a credit card in most places anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Credit card owners know what the deal is. Not only is paying with your credit card highly convenient, it also helps you build up good credit. Having a high credit score will help you out in life, and having a low score will make things harder for you. Cash and debit cards can’t build up good credit for you, but credit cards can. Okay, but what’s a credit score? Why do you need one? Your credit score is an indication of how reliable you are in paying your debts. Basically, people who ask for your credit score want to know that you will give them the money you owe them, or they will use your credit score as a general indicator of how trustworthy you are as a person. It makes sense that if your credit history shows that you pay your bills on time and that you’ve been doing so for a long time, people will trust you. If you tend to pay your bills late or you haven’t been building up credit for very long, then people will be more reluctant to rely on you. Banks and credit card companies will be less likely to lend money to you and employers and landlords may be less likely to hire you or rent you property.

You may have a hard time borrowing money, passing employment background checks or finding housing if you don’t have any credit built up. If you haven’t started building up credit yet, now is a good time to do so. Talk to your bank and apply for a credit card. If you have a hard time getting approved because of lacking past credit to begin with, try applying for a store credit card first. And if you’ve accumulated bad credit, all hope is not lost. Stop using your credit cards, pay off your debts, and get professional help to manage your credit situation. It is to your credit to ensure that your credit score is the highest that it can be.

Are all the Attractive Offers for Small Business Credit Cards really a Good Idea?

Small business owners have been noticing that their mail boxes have been kind of stuffed lately. They've been receiving more offers from marketers of small business credit cards than ever before. In fact, you could say that they have been positively swamped with offers; as each card issuer tries to outdo the others with perks, bonuses, rewards and discounts - it's sometimes too much for anyone to evaluate properly. Smart businessmen though, don't right away decide that it's time for more small business credit cards in their lives just because the rewards are great.

When the credit card reform law went live last year, it only helped the individual credit card holder. It did nothing for holders of small business credit cards. When dealing with small businesses, the credit card companies can still raise their interest rates whenever they want with no notice. They do everything to the small businessman to put one over them that they always did to the individual credit card holder.

The fact that the credit card companies feel tied down in their attempts to profiteer in the consumer side of their business, makes them extra eager to pull the wool over the small businessman's eyes. See now, there is a reason why the credit card companies seem to be falling over themselves to sell to the small businessman - there are no rules or laws around that tell them that they have to behave and be fair when it comes to business credit cards. And are they ever taking advantage of the situation.

Ever since the consumer credit card laws went into effect a year ago and made it difficult for the credit card companies to jack their interest rates up willy-nilly, they've come down on small business credit cards with a vengeance. Interest rates have gone up to 30% in this time. Not only that, they arrange things so that you actually end up paying a couple of percentage points more than what they advertise. It's all in the fine print (they assume you won't take time off from your business to pore over it).

But certainly, all those generous offers to do with special discounts, cashback and reward miles should be worth something, shouldn't they? Well, the credit card companies make all these rewards sound much better than they really are. And often, the small businessman just buys into all the hype. Usually, they charge you so much an interest and fees that the rewards don't offset anything more than a fraction of what you lose in the first place.

Small business credit cards could be of some use to those who deal with their monthly balances with an iron hand. Businesses are able to use their credit cards to build a line of credit and for this reason, they are useful. But you mustn't really be swayed by the rewards. Usually, credit card companies offer better rewards to the private customer.

When Someone Passes Away, do you have to Pay Credit Card Debt that they Owed?

Certainly, credit card debt among the elderly is at an all-time high. Elderly people just use their credit card for everything while they somehow stop thinking about how the debt piles up. Why, one out of three of the elderly have more debt on their credit cards than retirement savings. Somehow, they lose the ability to understand the gravity of what they are doing. Here's a question though - if you are, say, 70, and you have $10,000 on your credit cards, what happens if you pass away? Does the debt just disappear? Or are the next of kin supposed to be responsible and pay credit card debt left behind in this way?

With no kind of debt can the next of kin actually find themselves targeted. What can happen though is that if there is an estate left behind by the elderly person who passes away, the creditors, if they hold a note for a secured loan - a car, a house - they get what they are owed before any next of kin can share in it. With credit card debt though, things are somewhat different. The reason credit card interest rates are so high is that they give you unsecured debt. They don't hold any possession of yours as security to guarantee the loan with. Typically, if there is an estate, they do get paid; but they only get paid with anything that's left over after all the other creditors with secured debts are paid off. If there is nothing left to pay credit card debt with after all is said and done, they just don't get paid. A husband, wife or a child doesn't inherit anyone's credit card debt. Not unless they co-signed the credit card with the person who passed away. In that case, the remaining joint holder inherits all of the debt right away. If you do have to share a credit card with other family members, a good way would be to merely get the card on your own and then bring the other users on as add-ons.

The problem is that the general public doesn't seem to be aware of this. Many people somehow seem to imagine that credit card debt is inherited. Collection agencies are aware of this. They try to call the next of kin and try to convince them that the law requires that they pay credit card debt off that is owed by the deceased. Sometimes, the credit card companies themselves stoop to the level of trying to defraud the next of kin into believing that they owe something. They send threatening letters, make phone calls and so on.

If you do have a bank calling you and asking you to pay up, you really want to put as much space between yourself and this whole affair as possible. If things get impossible, call the bank and ask them for a copy of the credit card application for proof of who exactly owns the debt. To start off on the right foot, as soon as someone dies, you really could call the bank even before they call you, and ask them to stop charging interest on the credit card. Tell them that you are trying to settle everything that the estate owes and that you'll keep them posted.

Millions of Americans, Sick of Drowning in Consumer Credit Card Debt, Decide on an All-Cash Lifestyle

Sometimes, you just have to rip it off - cut it up - quit cold turkey. No, we're not talking about drugs or Band-Aids. To many people, the fact that they have a card with a $50,000 spending limit is an eternal source of comfort. And it's a source of comfort that they seek solace of often. It's always there - a backup plan for life, no matter what one needs. The reason Americans run up staggering amounts of consumer credit card debt is pretty simple - spending money, you never realize how hard it is to actually make money. And yet, it can be surprisingly easy to run over a $50,000 spending limit in two years or less. The most heartbreaking part of living your life running up a credit card balances is that, you have no idea where all the money goes. You're just left there holding a bill that reads "Page 1 of 40".

While it does sound unfortunate that there should be all these people whose lives were destroyed by consumer credit card debt, the story does have a happy (ongoing) ending. Over the last year alone, fully 10 million Americans have completely bailed on credit cards. It might have been a tough lesson learning; but if it's taught this many families that they need to take back control over their lives, it might have well been worth it.

People who give up credit cards find that there's a funny way in which living their lives within their means affects them. If there's a big purchase that they have to plan for, they put money by for it over a period of time. And when they finally have what they need, they decide against it. When they have a large sum of money that completely belongs to them and they know that they have to give it up to buy something, it just doesn't seem worth it anymore. If there are 10 million Americans giving up on credit cards every year agonizing over every purchase decision before parting with a dollar, it's no wonder that America's recovery has been long and slow.

Sometimes, people just don't understand how they could work up tens of thousands of dollars' worth of consumer credit card debt when they've been careful to never spend on anything that could be called extravagant - no home makeovers, expensive shoes, or travel plans. For lots of people, just trying to keep up a middle-class lifestyle can make them lean on their credit cards hard enough that things could get out of hand. Once they manage their debt, give up their credit cards and take up an all-cash lifestyle, life can seem a little weird.

You always have to plan for exactly what you'll be doing through the day; you have to calculate ahead of time how much you'll be spending on groceries or lunch or travel. If something turns up in the middle of the day, you won't do it if you don't have the cash. As restricting and as painful as this seems to many people at first, it can be a truly liberating experience. It can be liberating knowing that you just won't spend what you didn't plan for at the start of the day. And that in a nutshell is what it takes to escape a life of debt. You need to know exactly what you will spend and never spend a cent over it.

The Steps you need to Take if you are Serious about Paying Off Credit Card Debt

To look at the kind of data the Federal Reserve puts out you would think Americans had turned quite responsible about paying off credit card debt. Apparently, American credit card debt has come down by about 10% over the past quarter. Isn't that stupendous news? You’ve been hearing forever from everyone from Suze Orman to Oprah that Americans just have no idea how to handle their financial lives. Here finally is proof positive that America has finally learned how to treat credit cards with a little respect. Or is it?

American banks didn't really have an extra 10% of their outstanding loans paid back; it's just that once a loan account at a bank remains unpaid for six months, banking regulations require that they write that loan off as uncollectible. America's debt can lose some of its scary edge without having anyone actually paying off credit card debt. There are other ways in which figures to do with the banking industry can mislead. For instance, you get all worked up about how much credit card debt shrank from between April and June of last year and you are encouraged; and then when you learn about how much it grew with new consumer credit card purchases, and you learn that that figure is twice the figure the total shrank by. Statistics released by the banking industry can be quite incomprehensible to most people.

What are consumers supposed to do then who really wish to turn those figures around by paying off credit card debt? Anyone who finds themselves beginning to lag behind in their payments should start off on the right foot and ‘fess up. They should arrange for a meeting with a credit counselor or a bankruptcy attorney. Doing this gives you a bit of information on what your options are. Doing this doesn't mean that you need to go and declare bankruptcy. It just means that you are serious about what you owe. You can make a mention of this when you start to speak with your bank and earn a little extra credibility.

Carrying huge balances from month to month and merely scraping by making the minimum payments can be a pretty strong sign that one is heading for bankruptcy. To help salvage the situation, one could consider a debt management plan. This could be a lot better for your credit score than bankruptcy or debt settlement. Credit counselors can often help you work out a repayment schedule that you can manage.

Debt settlement has always been a dangerous option for people to choose. This is where you are offered a plan where you don't need to pay everything you owe. At these places, you get questionable sounding advice that asks you to skip credit card payments. And they charge substantial fees too for this kind of advice before they actually do anything for you. A lot of the time, people just walk away from these settlement firms having paid the fee and found nothing valuable offered. Thankfully, a new federal law makes sure that these companies are not allowed to charge you up front. You don't even need their help anymore for a debt settlement program. If you are well past a payment, you'll get a call from the bank asking if you are interested in a settlement deal.

Managing Credit Card Debt

Before you can figure out what to do about managing credit card debt, you have to figure out how you got into trouble in the first place. Though there are some that simply overspend, chances are good you had a different sort of problem. If it is overspending that you are doing, you have to learn to cut back or you are never going to get out of debt. If you can learn to live within your means and also that charging is not always the best option, you can get out of debt. For others, the answers are not always that easy, but you can find your way out and prepare for the future with a little work.

Some people go into debt and have problems specifically managing credit card debt because something else in live came up that was unavoidable. For many people, these things are medical bills. Even those with decent insurance policies can not keep up with co-pays and a high delectable when a major medical issue occurs. When this happens, your credit card payments can fall by the wayside. You have to pay your medical bills, but you do still have to pay your credit card debts. See if you can make minimum payments just long enough to get your medical bills paid off. You will have to pay more than the minimum or the debt will never go away, but doing it for a short time won't hurt too much if you have no choice.

Other people have trouble managing credit card debt because they had an unexpected expense. This could be something like having to buy a different vehicle, an unexpected move, or perhaps a few exceptionally high utility bills a few months in a row. This is enough to throw someone off who has to live paycheck to paycheck. You may also have to help out one of your children or a friend in need. If these things happen to you, do your best to pay at least some of your monthly payments on your cards so that you do not get too far behind.

For some folks, there is no one thing that seems to be the cause of credit card debt problems. It can be a chain of small things with one small event tipping the scales. It can be hard to live without much, and only finding a way to make large purchases by using a credit card. The problem with cards are the interest rates, which can double and trip with one late payment. Making the minimum, as stated above, is not the best idea for managing credit card debt, but it saves you from a higher interest rate. You can't pay down your debt that way, but it can save you from higher bills in the future if that is all that you can muster.

Everyone has the potential to stumble with financial issues once in a while. The key is to not ignore the problem, which some people do. Managing credit card debt can mean nothing more than trying to do something to fix things. Not acting will leave you with a huge mess that can affect your life for years and years to come. As long as you do something you may be okay. At the worst, you can call for debt consolidation help. There is always someone willing to help you as long as you want to help yourself.

Deciding on the Best Credit Card Offer

The credit card companies are actually quite anxious for your custom. These days, new credit card offers come with all kinds of freebies and attractive gifts - free flights to anywhere you wish to go, a free iPad, interest-free cash advances - not only are they getting a lot more generous with their offers than they ever have been, there are getting a lot more creative as well. It used to be that you could collect every offer that came to you in the mail and bargain with the company that you chose by showing them what all the others were offering. That used to be the way to get the best credit card offer. And then came the recession, a time when the credit card companies just withdrew all their offers altogether. With the best credit card offer letters promising 100,000 miles, $150 in cash back rewards and 0% cash advances, the market is finally a place where it's worth your while to play one against another.

The great part about all these offers is that everyone's just being upfront. All of this is just plain old capitalism. No one's trying to pull anything. While the offers may be raining faster and thicker than ever before in the past three years, the consumer still needs to exercise a bit of caution picking and choosing among them all for the lowest fees and interest rates. It could hardly do to choose a card that had attractive-looking rewards but that took it all back with over-the-top interest rates.

Blank checks from the credit card issuers are back in style. Before the recession kicked in, credit card users would cash their blank checks, open a high yield savings account with it, and earn some interest on it for free. That really won't get you anywhere these days now that bank interest rates are among the lowest ever. But you can use the check you get for paying down expensive debt elsewhere or for balance transfers. The average American has credit card debt worth $3500. That would usually cost about $650 in interest; if you could pay off even a small fraction of that, you could save $100 in interest.

New cardholders have more to look forward to today than ever before. Your sign-on bonuses have become more generous than at any time in recent memory. If you are planning on making a large purchase in the near future, you could time your credit card application to when you actually make that purchase. If you pay the balance off in full, this could work out to be very profitable. It could be a tough call picking out the best credit card offer - seeing as how generous many of them are. Chase Freedom has upped the cashback ante by 50%; on American Express, when you spend $500 and three months, you get a top-of-the-line Kindle and a gift card worth $100. It's all about choosing the best from rewards for your needs.

Great Credit Card Perks that really Speak to You

It's a nice problem to have - Americans are cursed with choice in all kinds of ways. When it comes to credit cards for instance, there are literally thousands of choices that anyone would need to sort through to find a product for their needs. And it isn't just the consumer who has a hard time either; imagine what it must be like for the credit card issuers who have to think of ways to have their products stand out among competitors whose products seem more or less the same. When there are this many bankers working overtime trying to dream up a card that is unusual, cool or otherwise worthy of the consumer’s time though, there are bound to be a few really good choices that come up from time to time. And that means there usually are products here and there that find a way to offer you more than just your regular points or miles rewards. You get credit card perks sometimes that you would never believe.

When you go make a purchase at Best Buy, do you worry about what happens if a month later, your shiny new laptop or digital camera should just die? If you don't relish the thought of running around for warranty replacement and worrying about being given a refurbished replacement unit in the end, how about paying for your purchase with an Amex card or a ThankYou Premier card from Citibank? They completely take care of it or reimburse you for up to $1000. If you want a great way to keep the checkout people off your case asking you to buy their extended warranty, paying with a Visa Signature card or a Gold MasterCard should do it for you. You'll just need to tell them that you don't have to bother because you're getting an extended warranty pain with these credit cards anyway.

Let's say that you do complete your purchase at Best Buy and you're pretty happy with it (it doesn't break or anything), but a month later, you see that the same store is advertising the same product at $100 less. Do you ever feel like a sucker at that point? Well, you don't need to. Now if you have Citibank's Premium card. With this card, whatever you buy this price guaranteed for two months. If the product falls in price by up to $250 within two months, Citi will give you back the difference. There are several MasterCard options but these credit card perks as well.

What is the number one product that travelers have stolen from them in America? It's laptops (in case you didn't guess). While most laptops are stolen from people when they pass through an airport, MasterCard will protect you if your stuff is stolen from your hotel room. If you pay for your hotel room with the MasterCard credit card, they will reimburse you enough to buy new anything that you lose in your hotel room.

Open any travel related magazine today and you never get to hear the end of how people hate those add-on fees on the airlines. And the most notorious among those add-on fees has to be the checked baggage fees every airline demands. Credit card perks to do with checked baggage fees are always appreciated. With a Visa Signature card from US Bank, you get $25 towards checked baggage fees when you redeem the points to get for an airline ticket. American Express gives you $200 every year for baggage fees as well.

Battling the Credit Card Acceptance Problem when you Travel to another Country

Credit card acceptance is something you take for granted. You go to a store that displays the logo of your credit card and there is nothing more that you think about in the whole thing. Considering that Visa, MasterCard and American Express are American products, wouldn't you expect that they would bring their latest technology out to market here in America? Well, try using one of your credit cards anywhere in Europe and you're likely to run into a fundamental problem - credit cards over there don't work with a magnetic strip. Their credit card readers (or the people manning the machines) aren't equipped to deal with the ancient magnetic strips that American credit cards have. They expect cards to come with an embedded smart chip. You'll have this happen to you no matter what country in Europe you travel to.

Credit cards with an embedded smart chip are called EMV cards (for Europay-MasterCard-Visa). And American banks, realizing that their outdated credit card products are keeping people from doing their shopping when they travel overseas, are beginning to deal with the whole credit card acceptance issue by issuing their own EMV cards that'll be accepted worldwide. While in Europe every kid fresh out of college gets one of these EMV cards, in America, the banks are trying them out only with special superrich customers first. If you don't happen to be especially rich and you still need to travel to Europe, Travelex, the currency exchange business, will sell you an EMV debit card that you preload with money. You will also find them with some credit unions.

Not to be too hard on the American banks for holding off so long on innovation. The reason Europe was an early adopter of this technology was that they believed that credit cards that held their information locked up in a chip protected by a secret PIN number would be far safer than a credit card that was open to the world with information in a magnetic strip. They also believe that credit cards like this would be harder to counterfeit. There's no reason why these beliefs should be mistaken. Except that they are.

American banks have found that EMV credit cards are actually stolen from, a lot more than magnetic strip cards, for some reason. The expense it would be to throw away every credit card reading machine in America and replace it with a new one is understandably a concern too. Until the industry sorts itself out, problems while you travel to Europe, Canada or Asia, are only to be expected. While their card readers certainly are capable of accepting magnetic strip credit cards from the other side of the Atlantic, the clerks who man those desks and operate those machines have never actually seen a magnetic strip credit card and have no idea what to do with them.

Since most clerks will refuse to put in the extra effort it might take to figure out how to use your credit card, carrying a prepaid EMV debit card would have to be the next best thing. It would guarantee credit card acceptance for you.

Are Credit Cards for Teens a Smart Idea?

There is one area in which college students never fail to rack impressive figures up in - and that area isn’t necessarily a scholastic one. The average college student comes out of college with $3500 worth of credit card debt. Of course, this deeply upsets parents - who want more than anything else to help their children get a good start in life. When the subject turns to the wisdom of credit cards for teens, parents receive conflicting advice. Parenting experts seem enthusiastic about the tough love approach - that you should just say no when your kid asks for a credit card. The financial advice magazines seem to say the opposite - that young people need to make their mistakes early in life so that they have plenty of time to recover and learn financial responsibility. Which might be right?

Whether or not credit cards for teens are a smart idea, there's one thing that all the parenting and financial advice columnists agree on - that parents and children don't spend enough time talking about what money is all about and how financial responsibility is to be learned. There have been surveys done about this that have found that two out of three parents of 17-year-olds never ever bring up the subject of financial responsibility with them.

If you were to discuss financial responsibility with your 15-year-old, which tack would you take? There is a lot of sense you perceive on each side of the divide. Some parents justifiably see credit cards for teens as they do driving licenses for teens. Young people are naturally irresponsible - not having had the time to evolve enough to learn the importance of being responsible. A license to drive can end up in a drunk teen driving his car off the road. Irresponsible credit card use on the other hand, can end up in $20,000 of crippling debt for a family (and not infrequently has this been known to happen).

Parents who favor credit cards for teens sometimes go this route because they plan to fully keep an eye on everything that goes on with that card. They want to take every chance they get to teach their child what they might be doing wrong. If it weren't for this learning opportunity, they feel, their child would just turn 21, get his own credit card, and then promptly spend himself into ruin. They feel that they should let a child make his mistakes while there is someone to catch the more serious ones in development. And of course, they could just give their child an add-on card with definite spending limits.

Now there's quite a lot to be said for the argument that you need to give a child a credit card and supervise things closely to be able to tutor him. There are more young people than anyone would care to admit who have no idea how an APR works, how due dates work and what credit scores are. There was a Jaywalk segment on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno once that showed 21-year-olds displaying their deep ignorance about these matters. Many young people seriously believe that when your credit card statement asks for a minimum payment, that's all you need to pay. They just aren't aware of how making just the minimum payment each month leaves the rest of the money unpaid and racking up increased rates of interest.

Up until a year ago, banks would open their branches inside college campuses and issue cards to students - without getting their parents’ permission. The credit card reform bill put an end to that. A young person today can get a credit card only if a parent co-signs the application. What that shows to us is that the general consensus does lean towards getting credit cards into the hands of young people, but only doing so when parents have an active role to play.

Does it make Financial Sense Canceling Credit Cards?

When the Times Square bomber was caught boarding a plane to the Middle East, the first thing that the newspapers wanted to know was, whether he paid for his ticket with cash. Who on earth would want to pay with cash, the newspapers wanted to know, and be left with less buyer’s protection and with no way to claim reimbursement at the office? Apparently, if you don't use a credit card for something, you're as good as a terrorist. Financial institutions all over the country seem to agree with this too - and the US Treasury is responding by putting out fewer new dollar bills every year. But there are some pretty good reasons you can think of to buck the trend toward plastic. While canceling credit cards can seem like a strange lifestyle choice to make - completely out of step with the way of life being promoted everywhere today, it can make a lot of personal financial sense.

You're probably asking yourself why canceling credit cards would be a good idea; you don't get those card bonuses and rewards, you don't get to take advantage of cheap Internet retailer prices and so on. Actually, these arguments don't make much sense. Let's take a look why.

Let’s go with that Internet shopping thing first. Just because you are not willing to do anything other than cash doesn't mean you can't buy online. You can go and get a prepaid card - with no credit. You have to pay cash to buy the card; and also, it isn't linked to your bank account like a debit card is. You don't have a large sum of money lying there waiting for you to use it. You have what you put into your prepaid card to start out, and that's all. You can still take advantage of those online shopping deals and you can have something to keep yourself covered when you're traveling.

There happen to be lots of advantages to canceling credit cards too. To begin with, remember how you keep hearing these days about identity theft? Huge corporations from American Express to Sony PlayStation keep getting their servers mercilessly hacked and getting their contents thrown to the four winds. If you don't keep credit cards, you don't ever have to worry about having it stolen.

But there can be many more tangible advantages that you can get to enjoy every month too. For instance, overspending doesn't appear nearly so impossible to stop when you don't have credit cards. There are no impulse purchases to make when you don't have money at the ready. When there are few impulse purchases getting in the way of your monthly budget, budgeting every month becomes a lot easier and a lot more doable. A study done by MIT has found that America's shopaholic character only really came into being in the 50s when the first credit cards took off. People really do spend less when they don't have plastic on them.

And if you're worried about losing those card rewards and bonuses, you shouldn't. To begin with, those frequent flyer programs at the airlines are really more trouble than they're worth. The airlines are making it more difficult than ever to use them in a way that would be convenient to you; and anyway, they're cutting back on them all the time. If you didn't have credit cards and didn't have to contend with all the overspending that came with it, you could afford to buy your own plane tickets to anywhere.

The Best Credit Card to get for Pay your Debt Down With

The credit card companies have put us through so much over the past few years. We have suffered slashed credit limits, more expensive interest rates and unreasonable fees. And then we've had the government getting into the fight to help protect us. The whole thing could turn anyone off the plastic once and for all. What is it even worth, really, we seem to ask ourselves often. Come to think of it, the credit cards that we all hold on to today really aren't as rewarding as they might have been once.  But you need to realize that the credit card market has completely changed over the past year. Whatever was the best credit card to get last year should be quite pointless now, next to the kind of innovative programs they've thought up at the banks.

This past year has been quite an eventful one for consumer credit card legislation. The banks have had to face up to new rules about how they can't just raise your interest rates or manipulate your payments to suit then. What has resulted is a considerably reworked credit card market. If you're looking for the best card to get, this would be a great time. They’ve brought out products unlike we haven’t seen at least since 1990. The market is that strong for the consumer today. Let's take a look at what the best credit card to get today would be for different needs.

On average, every home in America owes about $8000 in credit card debt. Want to know how it got to be that high? No, it isn't that American households are irresponsible with their personal finances. Each month, whatever you paid, the banks would apply it to whatever you owed the least interest on - just to suit their bottom line. According to the new rules though, whatever you pay has to first be applied by the bank towards your highest interest debt first. If you are interested in wiping that credit card debt out, today's credit cards are going to make it a lot easier on you. If you want to manage your debt today, you'd be best off with two separate cards - one that gives you a great low interest rate on purchases, and another card that gives you a great balance transfer deal. You're supposed to make all your purchases on the low interest rate credit cards and pay them off every month. But if you can't pay them off, you're supposed to transfer your balance to the other card that gives you a low transfer rate. Your purchase card could be the Citi Forward or the Simmons First Platinum Visa, and the Discover More could be your low transfer rate card.

Under the new credit card act, it's nearly impossible for anyone under 21 to get some spending power, unless they have a cosigner or a real income. If you are a student, you now have very little choice. If you try to get a card that's not specifically intended for students or other people with limited credit, it could get to be extremely expensive - so expensive that it might hurt your credit score. But even student credit cards can be less than desirable. The credit card company will count your student loan as a source of income and give you a big fat spending limit - and you can easily overspend your way into insurmountable debt. The best credit card for the students should be something like the Citi mtvU Platinum Select Visa Card for College Students.where you actually get awards for a good GPA and you get rewards for paying back on time. They try to teach you good spending habits early on.

Look No Further for the Best Cash Back Credit Card Offers

Everyone's saying that the president deciding to dip into the national energy reserves to stabilize those gas prices, was really something he did to help his reelection bid. Nevertheless, this hasn't helped that much. Gas prices really still do remain historically high. People will pay more for an old gas saving Prius today than a new one would go for - because there is a waiting list for a new car. That's how desperate people are for way to save on paying for gas. But there's a way that lots of people overlook - taking advantage of one of the best cash back credit card offers that come especially made  for cheaper gas. You get 5% off any purchase you make a gas station - and not just for gas either.

Everyone should have one of these. If you have been thinking about which the best cash back credit card is for gas purchases, look no further. Actually, you do have to look further - the answer is in the coming paragraphs.

Let's start with the Chase Freedom Card. With this card, you get 1% cashback whatever you buy anywhere. When you buy gas, groceries and home-improvement stuff though, you get 5% cash back. But can't you get everything together. They rotate among these categories every month and choose to give you 5% off only on one category a month. The great thing is, this card comes with no annual fee. Which makes it one of the best cash back credit card offers you'll see on this list.

The Platinum Cashback Rewards card from the Pentagon Federal Credit Union is a great little card - and not least because it's from a credit union. As you can tell by the name, this credit union was made for the Armed Forces. Today though, anyone can get one of their great offers. You just have to make a donation of $20 or so to one military cause to qualify. Anyway, you get 5% on gas pumps the whole year around. And of course, this comes with no annual fee either.

You're probably thinking about why there are no gas brand affiliations on this list. Well, you've got the Chase BP Visa card and the Chevron and Texaco Visa card. With the latter one, whenever you visit a Texaco or Chevron station and pay with the card, you get 10 cents back for every gallon you pump. For anything that you buy at the gas station store, you get 3% back in fuel credits. The Chase BP card on the other hand gives you 5% all through; and for any travel-related expenses, you get 2% percent back.

Of course, rewards cards can be a great only if you can organize things so that you never have to pay interest. If you wish to carry a balance, these cards are probably not for you.