It can often be the case that people will have more than one credit card. You might wonder whether this could be a good idea for you to do as well. However, it is something that you need to think about as there are pros and cons to doing it.
Advantages of Having Several Credit Cards
If you have more credit cards, it will mean that you will have access to more money. This could be extremely handy if you need a lot of money and you find that having one card will not let you have access to enough. Therefore, having another one means that you will be able to have more money. So, if you max out the one card by spending all the money that you are entitled to, you will be able to use the other one to spend money with. It might even just give some people peace of mind to know that they have a second card available just in case they run out of money and need some extra in an emergency.
You might find it easier to organise your spending better with two cards. You might spend certain things on one and other on the other, perhaps one for online and one for offline or things like this. You might have two types of card, perhaps a reward card which has interest which you only use for things you know you can afford to repay and a cheaper card for purchases that you plan on repaying slowly so you need to make sure that you have a lower interest rate for that.
Some credit cards, such as American Express cards my not be accepted in all shops or by all people. This means that if you do have one of these, then it could be a good idea to have another one as well just in case you want to buy something on a credit card and cannot do so on that particular card.
Disadvantages of Having Several Credit Cards
Although having access to extra money can seem really good, it can actually be a problem. It can be easy to spend more than you can afford to repay and this means that you could end up with a lot of debt to pay off and not be in control of your money. You can prevent this by carefully noting down what you are spending and this will mean that you will be able to keep a check on it and make sure that you are not spending more than you can afford to repay. However, with two cards it means that you will have to track two things and this could make it more complex. There would therefore be more risk that you would spend more than you could afford to repay.
Some people will also see the credit limit on their credit card as an amount of money that is there for them to spend. They will want to have fun with it and spend it and then will slowly repay it using the minimum payment amount. This is not a sensible approach at all. Firstly, it is so easy to forget how much it costs to borrow money like this. There will be interest to pay each month and when you repay the minimum payment, you only repay the interest and not much more which means that you may not be able to repay the debt for a very long time – perhaps even years and you will pay a lot of interest by keeping the debt for a long time. A lot of people will keep spending on the card as well and so it will never get repaid.