Minimising credit cards

I was chatting with a good friend of mine the other day, and she told me that her husband had lost his wallet.

Worse thing is, aside from the cash, everything else was inside, the ID card, credit card etc.

The first thing I asked was, “I hope you guys have called the banks and cancelled all the cards”.

She then nonchalantly replied, “Well, he only has one credit card. So it was quite alright”.

Well well, another advantage of minimising credit cards. If you only have that one or two cards, you can easily call the banks to have them cancelled in such scenarios. Imagine if you had 6 or 7???? Man… I’ll need to remember which banks issued which cards…

I never owned a credit card until I started working more than 10 years ago. (Well, I did have a debit card though.) And yes, when I got my first paycheck, I applied for the UOB Lady’s card. I couldn’t remember why I applied for the Lady’s card as my first card, but I highly suspect that it has to do with it’s marketing tactics — “The men don’t get it“. Ooh… how sexy.

Over the course of the next few years, I had more cards. 8 in total. I didn’t even apply for some of those! The banks just sent to me.

Quite a lot, I know. 8 cards!!!! Why would I need 8 cards?? And to think back, the reasons why I applied for some of those cards then were really silly. I think one of the banks were giving away a free umbrella as a promotion during a road show. And I applied. There were a few other cards that I don’t remember why I had even applied for in the first place.

The problem with having too many cards is, I tend to spread my spending all over the place. Whenever there is an additional discount tied in with payment using a certain card, I will be sure to use that card to pay. Well, it saves me money right?

To be honest, I don’t really know.

The problem is, because there were too many cards, it became really difficult for me to track my spending, and sometimes, I miss out the payments, and hence, incurring late charges and interest charges. 

I do try to call the customer service hotline to get these waived. Well they typically do so for the first time but subsequently, it depends on your luck.

A couple of years back, I tried to trim down the number of cards I had. And were left with 5 cards.

Even though I still owned 5 cards, I concentrate my spending on mainly 1 card. So the rest of the cards were kind of useless in a way. I only used them if they offered me discounts.

A month ago, I cut them down further. I cancelled all the other cards except one.

What if the credit card terminal doesn’t accept the one card I have? Well, there’s still the old trusty nets machine.