Are you one of the 253 million adults in the US with a credit card? Great! We congratulate you on taking steps towards utilizing these financial products to achieve things like increase your credit score, earn free rewards, and protect yourself when shopping online or in-person.
Don’t have a credit card? No worries! While we wouldn’t say they’re “easy” to get, they can be if you have taken the steps needed to boost your credit score so that you qualify for one of the best credit cards. Once your credit score is around 700, you start to qualify for cards with higher rates of rewards and better perks.
However, you can qualify for rewards credit cards even with a lower credit score. And, if you don’t have credit history, you can start to build that with a secured card. Simply put, you’ve got your fair share of choices! If you’re still not convinced this is right for you, then go ahead and check out our list of 10 good reasons why to get a credit card!
Good Reasons to Get a Credit Card
1. Build Credit History
Don’t have any credit history? Having and using a credit card is a great way to build credit history. We know, this is a bit of a catch-22, but it’s still possible to build credit history if you’re starting from zero.
If you don’t have any credit history or have poor credit, we suggest starting to build your credit with a secured credit card. If you do have credit history and just want to boost your score and continue to increase the length of time that you’ve had your accounts open, applying for a new card can help!
2. Lower Your Credit Utilization
Your credit utilization rate is the amount of credit you use compared to the amount of available credit you have. For example, if you have $10,000 of available credit and have used just $1,000 of it, your credit utilization rate is just 10%. As a rule of thumb, you should try to keep this under about 30% or else your credit score can go down.
Likewise, one way to keep your credit utilization rate down without decreasing your spending is to get a credit card! A new one, we mean. Why? Because when you get a new credit card, your overall limit will increase.
3. Earn Rewards
Why do you need a credit card? For the rewards! Yes, we know that you can also get these types of great rewards with a Cheese Debit Card. But you can also enjoy great rewards with many credit cards as well.
Click here to check out our list of some of the best credit cards with various different types of rewards. This includes the chance to earn 5% cashback on certain spending categories and the ability to rack up points that you can spend on things like air travel (hello summer vacation 2022!).
4. Earn Cash Back
Similar to rewards, when you get a credit card, you’re often able to earn cash back every time you swipe it. Again, this is a feature of the Cheese Debit Card, yes, but if you feel like improving your credit history and using a credit card to build your score, it helps if you’re spending with one that earns you cash back.
5. Get a Free Sign-Up Bonus
Didn’t know you could earn free money with a credit card? Yep! Most of the higher-end credit cards (which are reserved for people with above-average credit), come with a free sign-up bonus.
Some of the best credit cards with sign-up bonuses include the Chase Freedom Flex, which allows you to earn $200 cash back after you spend $500 on purchases in your first three months after opening the account. Other bonuses range anywhere from about $200 to $5,000.
6. Access Emergency Money
While it’s smart to spend with a debit card, sometimes you need to access emergency money that you don’t have in your bank account. This is where credit cards come in handy. Depending on your credit limit, you can potentially access thousands of dollars when you need it. You obviously have to pay that money back (or risk affecting your credit score), but it’s nice to have that cushion whenever you need it.
7. Access Detailed Purchase History
Not sure how to keep track of all of your purchases? Nearly every single credit card these days comes with a handy app and web portal where you can access a detailed purchase history for your records.
8. Interest-Free Money
You don’t need a great credit score to get your hands on some interest-free money! Nowadays, most credit cards come with a 0% APR for the first year, which means that you don’t owe any interest on the money you charge to the card.
This is helpful for people who use credit cards for emergency purchases, to finance a small business, or for other similar situations where you need to spend a lot of cash upfront and want to pay it off little by little without interest over the course of a year.
9. Online Purchase Protection
While most card issuers, both credit and debit, protect you from fraud, credit cards usually come with special online purchase protection features. In fact, these come mainly from credit card issuers such as Mastercard and Visa themselves.
If you want to spend freely in 2022 knowing that you can purchase safely online and in retail stores, get a credit card.
10. Boost Your Credit Score
And, last but not least, our top reason why to get a credit card is the fact that, just by having one, you can boost your credit score. This is due to all of the reasons listed above, but mainly because of the first two.
When you get a credit card, you are building credit history and you are, little by little, lowering your credit utilization rate the more and more you increase your credit limit. Opening a new account can temporarily bring your credit score down due to the credit check required, but you’ll bounce back quickly!
Build Your Credit with Cheese
No, we’re not going to start offering credit cards (at least not for now!). But, we are introducing a new credit builder feature within the Cheese app that will help you track your purchases and monitor your score so that you can adjust your spending habits and build your credit!
Ready to start building your credit? Join Cheese today, and be sure to keep spending with your Cheese Debit Card so that you can enjoy the rewards we offer, too.
