First you have to have this revelation: Spending money now to save money later does not make sense. It’s illogical. Points systems make you think that spending extra on your credit card, right now, is a responsible thing to do. It isn’t. It took me six years to figure out why.

Back in 2007, I got an Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card. I knew the interest rate was double that of my old card, but I wasn’t worried. I always paid my bills on time. Plus, I’d studied the card benefits and determined that this card was going to be a financial boon. If I used it for my regular purchases—stuff like groceries, Friday nights, and clothes—I’d be traveling on Amtrak for free about half of the time.

I’ve been East-Coast-city-hopping on Amtrak for over a decade now. I’ve lived in Washington, Baltimore, New York, and Boston. No matter which city I’m in, I go to one of the others at least once a month. There have been whole years in which I’ve ridden Amtrak six or even eight times per month. What could be more sensible than a credit card perfectly tailored to my bizarre lifestyle?

The card worked exactly as I thought it would. Amtrak’s points system is honest, so I traveled on a free “points” ticket almost every second trip. What’s more, I paid the bill in full and on time every month. I never paid interest or late fees.

So why did I give up my Amtrak Mastercard and all of the free travel that came with it?

Sometime in 2010, New York Penn Station started to make me physically ill. Penn Station smells. There are too many humans in once space, and you inevitably touch one of them. (Ew.) The workers at Primo Cappuccino pretend they can’t hear your coffee order so that they can squeeze an extra dollar out of you by giving you a larger size or extra foam. And you’re stuck with a vat of prissy caffeine. Every bathroom is disgusting. Sure, having so many points that you get unlimited access to the first class lounge helps. Points-ing yourself up to the first class car helps. But bearable is not the same thing as pleasant.

Then in 2012, I realized that I was losing money on this card. Despite my ability to beat the interest trap, I was living my life one month in debt. I always knew how many Amtrak points I had, but I never knew exactly how much money I’d spent that week. I was swiping my card more often than I wanted to because credit card money didn’t feel like real money. And it isn’t real money. Credit is money that you haven’t yet earned.

I’d forgotten what cash was. Cash is a thing you use to buy ice cream at the ice cream truck when you’re seven. A credit card is a thing you use to make an impulse purchase at H&M because you had a bad day and you think, for a moment, that an ill-constructed but brightly colored shirt will make your life better.

So how do you free yourself from the “points” addiction? It’s not easy. If, after rent and bills, you spend $1,000 per month, it would take you $2,000 to go cold turkey on your credit card. You’d have to pay this month’s bill ($1,000) and then have your upcoming month’s spending money (another $1,000) in your checking account, waiting to be withdrawn from the ATM.

Maybe your finances are stable enough that you could switch from credit to cash today. You have double your monthly spending money just sitting there, ready to make an honest spender out of you. Congratulations! But beware: If you’ve been relying on a credit card for the past several years, you may not know your own spending habits anymore.

It took me five months to make the switch. I failed during the first month. I didn’t have enough cash to both pay last month’s bill and allot myself next month’s spending. I didn’t want to break into savings, and I was terrible at penny pinching. Even though I’d given up buying clothes altogether for one year, I couldn’t let go of the other treats that have become routine for me.

The second month I decreased spending in general, and tried to make all purchases with either cash or my ATM card. After doing that for three months, I became cash positive. On the fourth month I was finally able to spend cash only. But on the fifth month, I allotted myself too little cash and I ended up spending $150 on my credit card in the last week of the month. On the six month I got it right.

There are a million ways to go wrong with a credit card. Some people are impulse shoppers. Some are spending on their cards because they don’t have enough income to meet basic expenses. That’s a different scenario than the one I’m talking about here, and one that I have great sympathy for.

But if you’re a person who thinks you’re outsmarting the system by earning your points, take a closer look. Are you? And do you even want the things your points can buy?

You know what does make sense? Saving money now to spend later on something you’re looking forward to. Just ask your grandmother, or this woman who moved to Paris and spent her days sipping coffee in cafés for a few months because she saved for it. You can’t buy joy on points.

See also: “How to Play the Airline Miles Game”

Alexa Mills lives in Boston. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Just 7 percent of those surveyed knew that making several inquiries about a consumer loan, like a car loan or mortgage, in a short period of time won’t lower a borrower’s credit score. In fact, consumers should check multiple lenders to be sure they are getting the best rate, Stephen Brobeck, the federation’s executive director, said in a telephone briefing about the findings. This misunderstanding may hamper comparison shopping for interest rates, and end up costing consumers extra on their loans, he said.

Generally, multiple similar inquiries within a one- to two-week period are recognized as comparison shopping, so they count as one inquiry and don’t greatly affect your score, he said. Even if the inquiries span more than two weeks, it’s generally worth the effort because the potential savings outweigh a minor impact on your score, he said. “Consumers should not worry that comparison shopping for a loan in a week or two will lower their scores,” he said.

The Bucks blog is tackling credit scores this morning, and is reminding people that it’s okay to shop around for better rates if you’re looking to take out a loan and are worried about your credit score. I only think about my credit score whenever I’m apartment hunting because landlords are eyeballing the score to gauge whether or not I’ll be a risky tenant. The best way to maintain a good score (or to improve it) is to pay your bills on time and pay down your debt if you have it.

Almost two years ago, I performed one of my sporadic online bank balance checks, cringing at the damage I knew I inflicted the weekend prior. To my horror, five hundred dollars were missing. I have a shopping problem, but I’m nowhere near that crazy.

I opened up the statement and scanned the charges, sifting out the activity that was most definitely mine. Clothes, yes. Bars, yes. Six visits to different gas stations in two days? Me thinks not.

I immediately called up Chase Bank to report the fraud. The customer service rep on the other end was calm and helpful—she’d heard this story before. All I needed to do was print out my statement, highlight the charges I didn’t make, fax it over, and I would be reimbursed with 48 hours. And I was.

The biggest headache the fraud caused was a week without my debit card. But once I got my card and money back, I didn’t think about the fraud again.

Typical, apparently. A recent study found that even though the millennial crowd is the most targeted group for cyber crime (a third of us have experienced fraud!), we’re the least concerned about identity theft of all age groups.

Yup. I was a statistic. My generation is the most targeted for fraud, experiences the most fraudulent activity, and still … we care about our privacy the least. I think the apathy has less to do with indolence and more to do with convenience. As we grow into adulthood, technological advancements are causing conveniences to increase, and we have no trouble adapting. Going to the bank to deposit a check? No thanks; I’ll use the app from the comfort of my own couch cushions. Re-enter my credit card information every time I make an Urban Outfitters purchase online? Schyeaa right. I’ll be back.

But: We put ourselves at risk every time we use the same password for multiple sites or save any personal information on a site—even if it’s secure. Even the safest sites run the risk of a breach.

But I can’t get myself to care. Perhaps it’s because my assets are laughable, and I have little to lose. Or maybe it’s because I have actually experienced fraud, and the worst thing that happened was a 20-minute phone call with my bank and a week without my debit card. I lived through that, and would again.

Heather Sundell lives in Los Angeles. Photo: Kevin Cole

Did you know that American money cards are useless at many retailers in Europe because they are just pieces of plastic and not pieces of plastic with a chip embedded in them? FOR EXAMPLE, in London and Paris, you can’t rent public bikes because they require a chip and a pin! And we don’t have chips and pins! It’s annoying!

So why don’t we have them? Cost. (Of course.)

From Bankrate: “The cost to produce and distribute a card to a customer is under $2. The cost to make and distribute a chip card to a customer is between $15 and $20.”

Heidi Moore and friends discuss.

After many years of paltry minimum payments, I finally paid off all of my credit card debt. One last payment, and it was gone.

My parents raised me to fear the plastic, and for that reason I was always shameful of my credit card balance. But I still managed to rack up a couple grand in debt. It was for plane tickets, clothes, concerts—whatever else I had to have in the moment that my paycheck wasn’t going to cover.

But I always made payments. Minimums, mostly. Big ones, sometimes. It was easier to make payments in large chunks, like when I got birthday money or a tax return check. For me it was all or nothing with paying it down: huge payments or the minimum. I couldn’t bring myself to actually set up a real budget that would allow me to whittle it down regularly. That would have involved facing the amount of money I wasted each month.

I was abusing the credit card, and I knew it. I couldn’t seem to—or didn’t want to—break the cycle.

But then I wiped the slate clean.

A recent confluence of events have changed my financial situation. I got a new job with a higher salary. I’ve been having steady freelance income. An unexpected gift from my grandmother and cashing out vacation days at my old job buoyed my account further. I no longer have to live paycheck to paycheck. It’s a strange feeling.

But still, the credit card balance sat for weeks before I touched it. I was so hesitant to make that final payment. Part of it was that I was scared that I would run out of money for the month after I parted with such a big dollar amount. What if something happened, and I needed it? But that anxiety was familiar—it was the anxiety I’d had every month for the past six years. Every month I feel the pangs of fear that I would run out of money before my next paycheck, because sometimes I did.

This was the first month I didn’t have to worry, but I still couldn’t shake the need for a monetary security blanket. I am more financially stable than I have ever been, and it scares me.

Despite the relief this financially security has given me, it means something. It’s a milestone. I can support myself, live comfortably, and actually save more than a hundred bucks a month. I can be an adult, financially speaking.

Paying off my credit card signified a major point of growing up for me. It feels like I pushed past my youth and can never go back.

No more odd jobs. No more waitressing. No more dreading the dentist bill. Not having a credit card balance, having enough money to pay it off—it meant stepping down from my 20-something, life-is-short, collect-every-possible-experience-even-if-it-means-draining-your-accounts lifestyle. I’m done spouting life stories from the underbelly of stunted adolescence.

I knew I couldn’t hang on to that credit card balance or my financially unstable youth any longer. But that last step towards adulthood was scary. So like an unprotected left at a busy intersection, I just did it real quick, before I had time to change my mind.

Heather Sundell lives in Los Angeles.

Take 10 minutes at the end of each day and record what you spent. Use a notebook or your favorite app and track it. Over time, you start to see patterns. You learn things you didn’t know about yourself in terms of what your spending says about your priorities. That will naturally lead to change.

One of the reasons I focus on spending is that people think tracking doesn’t help. A great (or not so great) example is the time I taught a financial literacy class to people who were working their way out of the local homeless shelter. The first week, 20 people would show up. I gave them a pocket-size spiral notebook and asked them to record everything they spent for one week and to come back so we could move onto the next step. No one ever came back. After a few weeks, we canceled the class.

In the Bucks blog, Carl Richards says we can learn a lot about ourselves and make improvements when we track our spending (although he argues that people don’t track their spending because they think it doesn’t help, whereas I think people don’t track their spending because it’s tedious and they just don’t want to do it).

For people who don’t like to track their spending, Richards says the best thing they can do is to track one number every week (i.e. how much they’re saving every week), which means you’re already ahead of the game if you do our weekend and monthly check-ins. Our own Amanda Tomas has learned via her own monthly column to cut down on how much she spends at the grocery store to help her get her savings goal on track. It’s also a lot more fun to track what we spend, save, and pay off when there’s an amazing community around to offer encouragement (thanks everyone).

In this installment of “What Would You Do,” a mystery payment:

A payment was made to my credit card that I didn’t make. The amount was so specific (not a round number, down to the penny) that I was sure that it was a misapplied payment intended for another account. I filled out the online dispute and in the response I was asked to call customer service. When I did they said that the payment was mailed in (I always pay online) and that the payment department verified the payment and it was intended for my account. What would you do? — Amanda

Trying to figure out a mystery payment on a credit card is better than having to figure out an unauthorized credit card charge, and in this situation, I would have done exactly what you did: Call the credit card company and ask about where the payment came from. I would have also asked the customer service rep if it could be possible that a payment is made to a cardholder account by accident, and what happens next if that’s the case. Would I receive a notification about the mistake? Could it be possible that the credit card company wouldn’t realize its mistake until a few years from now and then make a correction then? If the rep can’t provide a clear answer to this, I’d ask him or her to get someone on the phone who could, and then write his or her name down.

No one has access to my account numbers except for me, but I’d also call up my parents to check if maybe one of them made the payment. If the mystery benefactor never reveals herself, I’d continue making my regular payments as usual and pretend like the mystery payment was never applied. That way, if a correction is made later down the line, the account would still be in good standing.

Email me your WWYD experiences to me with “WWYD” in the subject line. See previous installments.

I.

I’m an AmeriCorps member, serving as a quasi-social worker helping low-income families with their financial difficulties. I’m explaining to my client in painfully incompetent Spanish that there’s nothing she can do legally, that the landlord’s letter she handed me says she needs to move herself and her family out of their apartment by tomorrow, that the county will probably offer her shelter since her kids have social security numbers, even though she doesn’t. She asks if ICE will get involved if she goes to the county. I say no, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me.

Tears well up in her eyes, but she doesn’t cry. This angers me. I want her to give into those feelings of despair and hopelessness. I want her to cry. I want her to yell at me and piss me off so that I don’t have to acknowledge the massive failings of the system that gives me so much privilege. I want her to do nothing but whine so that I can blame her for not trying hard enough.

She doesn’t cry. Instead, she thanks me and leaves. I will never see her again.

II.

The man hands me $600. He’d promised me more, but, despite my very honest craigslist ad, he’s a little taken aback by the severe angle of the broken wheel and the extent to which the rear axle is bent.

“You did this by backing into a pole?” he asks.

I had done it by backing into a pole, yes. I had caused $2,600 in damage in five seconds of reckless driving. I’d totaled the car—the car my parents gave me so that I could visit them with less hassle, so I could babysit my sister’s kids more often, so that I could get to job interviews or do any after-work internship, the car with the brand new ignition switch that my sister had paid for, the car with brand new tires for which I was still $500 in debt. I’d been too cool to check behind me as I peeled out of the parking space, hitting the pole with a nauseating crunch followed by the even more nauseating sound of grinding gears and creaking metal as I slowly drove home.

As the man drives off, I run my fingers over the grainy hundred dollar bills. Later, I will use the money to buy an iPad.

III.

I’m standing in front  of a class of low-income mothers. They are required to be there by the county in order to continue receiving their welfare benefits.

I’m trying to explain to them the benefits of having a credit card and using it wisely. I outline the steps for good credit card use: using only 30 percent of your credit limit, paying the balance every month to avoid interest, applying only for a credit card you know you can get. It’s simple, I say, and if you do it right, it will really help you in the long run.

A woman raises her hand. “Why would I want to buy something with money I don’t have?” she asks, slouching in her chair, crossing her arms.

I explain to her that using a credit card wisely can help establish good credit.

“What’s the point of good credit?”

I fall back on the end goal of these financial workshops, the outcome my supervisors are pushing so that our reports look good to our funders, a goal which I have yet to see any of my clients realize.

Well, I say, in case you want to buy a house someday.

The woman rolls her eyes.

IV.

I’m at happy hour with a couple of friends. We’re discussing what we’d do if we won the lottery. I confess that I’d keep enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life and give the rest to various non-profits. My friends scoff at my idealism and suggest instead that I invest most of it and then give the money I make from the market.

I tell them I wouldn’t ever want to do that. I tell them that banks are what’s wrong with the world, that playing the market is basically validating a system where a bunch of privileged white dudes make money out of nothing but their own privilege, that an “investment” economy means siphoning wealth from people who actually work for a living and redistributing it amongst the mega-rich. I tell them that I don’t understand why anyone would ever want to buy a stock, because what is a stock, even?

A friend calmly points out that a stock is ownership of part of company, but I’m feeling confrontational. I tell him that this “ownership” is imaginary, that it doesn’t mean I have any say in the governance of the company, that I’m basically just using money to buy more money. “What does a stock actually get me?” I ask.

He looks at me with trepidation and I know I’ve been too forceful. You get more money to give away, he says.

Our food arrives. I feel naive.

V.

It’s Thanksgiving, and Levi’s is having an online sale.

I haven’t purchased a pair of jeans in two years. The one pair I own have faded from an unwashed cobalt to a grainy cerulean. The shape of my cell phone can be seen in the wash even when the phone isn’t in my pocket.

I look at the pair of dark blue 508s with a mix of desire and fear. I imagine myself in them, revelling in the thought of pants that actually extend to my ankle. A pair of jeans I could actually wear to work! I think. But even at 40% off, they’re more than I’ve spent on any article of clothing since I started my AmeriCorps term.

I access my bank account. This is usually a bracing reality check, a reminder of my permanent brokeness. I sigh in exasperated expectation of the bad news.

My first direct deposit from my new job has gone through. I am unexpectedly rich.

The jeans arrive a week later. They fit perfectly.

Sam Blackwell sometimes writes about TV for The Blogulator. He lives in Minneapolis. Photo: Jason Edward Scott Bain

One thing you can be certain of is that your life will never appear more uninteresting than when it is being enumerated to you over the phone by the woman from fraud protection at your bank. I did not know who had stolen my debit card and made out with $600 worth of sneakers in the Bronx, but I felt sure that he or she was sucking a lot more joy from the world than I was, with my $7 of off-brand fiber cereal, because a deal like that doesn’t happen every day.

It feels counterintuitive to say that I’ve made financial progress this year by becoming more cavalier about money, but at some point, if you’re living in New York and you’re in your twenties and you have no one to support but yourself and you’re lucky enough to have made it this far without much debt and you work at a job where even if you tried (and I mean really, really tried), you could never save money, not even a little bit, really, none, then at some point you realize that you’ve made all of these choices, and here you are, and the only thing to do is live it. Really live it.

Spend $14 on that absurd elderflower cocktail at the faux-speakeasy in Williamsburg because it will, genuinely, make you feel a little bit better about your life, and because fuck it, you live in New York, and you’re in your twenties, etc. etc.

This year was my attempt to work toward soothing the gut-clutching financial guilt. I got my first credit card with an adorable $2,000 limit and grew obscurely fond of the snug pocket of debt I collected. That credit card allowed me to travel across the country to celebrate with my far more grownup friends, the ones who launched alarmingly into married life this year.

And what a waste it would be, at a barn in Montana or under a wide summer sky in Maine, to stand beside friends who have crawled with you all of this way and to be mentally calculating just how much it cost—this dress, these shoes, that airfare, the slightly-mildewed cabin, the top of the line twin sleeping pads from their registry—rather than staring in heart-gaping wonder at these people you love declaring their love for each other. It is not, like the commercials say it is, priceless—my love for them is roughly $745, and it is worth every penny. For the first time in my life, I’m learning what things really cost.

Meghan Nesmith tweets her feelings.