>>A credit card should be a pay to avoid carrying cash and to protect yourself from scoundrel sellers, nothing more.
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>Unfortunately, it seems to take people learning this the hard way once to really be responsible about it. I am working my way out of learning the hard was as we speak. So has about everybody I have talked to in my age group about it. It seems people are less and less concerned about carrying a few thousand dollars balance because "they can pay it off in no time if they wanted to".

I don't know exactly how old you are, but I think you're a lot closer to my kids' ages (24 and 20) than to mine. Neither of mine carries a balance and they both know they never should.

Perhaps it's just a matter of our having educated them on the subject. We started each kid with a very low limit (like $500) card when he was about 16. That way, we got to supervise them using the card for a couple of years before they went off to college.

Tamar