What’s one “rule” of credit cards you didn’t know when you were younger? The one “rule” I didn’t know/understand was that you should always pay your statement balances off in full every month.

This is so funny. I had the completely opposite misunderstanding & experience.

When I entered college, I saw credit card promo posters in the university buildingin halls. Most of these posters prominently higlighted the APR interest rate in big bold font: “Low 20% APR after an introductory 6-month period!” “25% APR!”

I saw those posters, and I thought:

“Okay so they are saying that if I pay $100 using a credit card, I have to immediately pay back $120? That’s… dumb and wasteful. Americans are weird. I’m sticking with cash and debit cards and I’m never going to use credit cards.”

Nowhere in the poster did it say that the APR only applies when you don’t pay off the balance. APR was just baked-in. They were just competing with their relatively lower APR rates to each other.

So I didn’t get a credit card for 10 years.

10 years later, when I was 30 years old, I attended a financial literacy workshop where they explained that a credit card is 0% interest if you pay each month, and if you don’t pay it, then the following month you start accruing the APR interest.

It blew my mind that the credit card promo posters highlighted APR prominently under the assumption that people would NOT pay their credit card, and were laser-focused on showing how “low” the APR rates were, under the assumption that people would not pay off the card. This experience just blows my mind every time I think back of it.

And because of that, my credit history is 10 years shorter than everyone else in my age group.