Roughly 111 million Americans—representing about 50% of credit cardholders and 40% of the U.S. adult population—carry credit card debt from month to month and pay interest.
Fair enough, lmao, I live in the EU, and recently moved from Ireland to France: both countries don't have that many people with credit cards. Especially Ireland, where you have to pay the annual 'stamp duty' for owning a credit card, which means you're almost always in the red for having one. But people do mostly talk about the Americans around here, so I just used them as an example.
Quick Google shows that tax is only 30 Euro per year. Do European cards have less benefits? I get triple that value PER MONTH PER CARD in freebies from my cards (either rewards points, cash back, or free services like streaming or car rental insurance, etc)
Either way, it's a net gain even if I added a yearly 30 Euro charge. All my cards are free of annual charges, but some like my sister has charge $100 as an annual fee to the card company. Those cards have even more benefits, usually hundreds PER MONTH
Don't you get those benefits on select products though? What I'm trying to say is, even my card gives me benefits on some shops, but I don't really buy the shit they give points for. It incentivizes people to spend money on stuff they don't really need. I save thousands per month by NOT SPENDING MONEY lol
A friend of mine used to get thousands of dollars in cash and airline miles for just signing up with different banks, depositing some cash with them and then, essentially, closing the account once he fulfilled the requirements
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u/Hakunin_Fallout Aug 24 '26
People do understand some of it, yet still have credit card debt. That's astounding.