I make a 6 figure salary in one of the lowest COL cities in the US. I sometimes see people claiming to make significantly more in SV, NYC, and forth.

No way would I make that trade. My _PURCHASING POWER_ is probably vastly stronger than theirs. You say 40% but I could legitimately live off of 20% if I so chose. In fact, one of the problems I have is that I have absolutely no credit. As in, credit reports come back with zip, zilch, nada. And that can be problematic for people that don't trust seeing that.

If I'm being honest, it's a super power that I'm sad to see others are figuring out.

My wife and I both have damn near perfect credit scores because we make our money work for us. Everything goes on a card but we’ve never once carried a balance over or paid any interest. We have many vehicles because I like older autos, but I buy her a new Honda CRV every 5 years for her commute. I call a dealer in La Grange, GA and they deliver it to the house and I hand them a check.

If you don’t have credit I would recommended getting a card and using it for everything.

Our situation is 100% by design. I live in a neighborhood filled with people making $100K+ plus per year who are all leveraged like crazy and probably have no significant savings.

But the husbands all drive $50K+ trucks to go to their office jobs and their wives have the latest and greatest SUV.

In contrast, my pick up truck never gets used unless I need it for a specific task. Other than that it sits parked. My one “nice thing” that I allow myself is my Land Cruiser.

That's generally peoples reaction, I should get a CC with this technique or that technique. I don't need or want credit. And yes, sometimes people try to get smart and tell me my utility bill is credit. queue massive eye roll.

It's just not my thing.

Credit may not be your thing but you’re effectively losing out on a good bit of money by not having one.

I don’t have an exact number in front of me, but I imagine that we receive at least $8k back annually in rewards from our various cards.

The only thing that doesn’t go on a card is the electric bill because they didn’t allow it until recently. But I believe they now do so my wife will change it soon.

In addition to the free money, it’s also safer. I would never use a debit card.

This kind of thinking is a fugazi. Most people (yes even you, who pays off the card every month) are bad with money. Credit cards reduce the friction between any given transaction. This will cause you to spend more money than you would have otherwise. Generally by much more than the 2% rewards your card offers. If you are actually receiving 8k back then you’re spending like $400k per year.

Nobody got wealthy by using credit cards. The “free money” is a cheap psychological trick. I don’t have the hubris to think I’m better at resisting unnecessary spending than the marketing department at Visa who wants every extra dollar in my wallet.

What many people find, after falling into the “but I fully pay my card each month” trap, is that turning off the card after this point is difficult with their current income, because they have effectively pushed their real wages a full month into the future. Depending how heavily you’re into credit it can take several months to build up a cushion to avoid dipping into emergency funds to cut the cards for good.

The card is issued by my bank and is covered under the same consumer protection laws as your CC. Several companies have learned this the hard way.

How do you not have a credit card? It seems impossible and pretty inconvenient to pay cash for everything these days. In many large cities cashiers will look at you funny when you start taking out cash to pay, a lot of things are self checkout and only work with cards, not to mention no credit card makes online purchases a huge hassle.

I have a debit card that can be used as a cash backed CC. There's a daily limit on it but if you call in and let them know it's coming through it's not an issue. The last time I had to do that was to pay for emergency surgery for my cat.

In addition, my debit card is attached to an account I use specifically for said card, and generally speaking I only keep enough money in it to cover what I plan on using it for, this limits the amount of damage someone can do by stealing my CC, and I don't have overdraft protection on it to further limit my exposure.