Credit cards ~ Advantages and disadvantages

Nowadays, credit cards represent a major element of American life. The most interesting about the credit cards is that they begin to be used in the late adolescence, when children are developing their abilities. Generally speaking, credit cards have pros and cons related to the children’s delayed gratification. These advantages and disadvantages should be taken care of before applying for credit cards.

The understanding of the delayed gratification

Usually, parents try to socialize their children in order to make them able to live within the principles of the actual society and this socialization implies to learn them how to delay gratification. Most of the situations, young children have trouble to understand the notion of “later” while they don’t care too much about life issues. While it isn’t possible for everyone to always get what they want, then the delayed gratification is and important parameter. Children must learn to wait before buy. Credit cards tend to be offered to adolescents and that make them interesting because they just have “learned” the keys to delaying gratification as these adolescents had to learn too. The schism between the gratification theory and the credit card theory creates benefits but also problems to the American society.

The advantages of credit cards

There are lot of advantages credit cards have. The major advantage of credit cards is that they permit people to make large purchases, such as expensive semester textbooks or those for cars. Also, credit cards can help for emergencies like medical bills caused by accidents. A responsible repayment of credit cards would permit the card holders to fit into middle class American life and, the same time to develop quality spending habits. Additionally, adolescents may develop a basic moral code and stronger ethics while putting face to face credit cards and the societal rules for delayed gratification.

The disadvantages of credit cards

While parents offer credit cards to their children who have not totally learned how to delay gratification, the American society induce to their consumers the tendency to buy excessively without paying attention whether they will be able or not to pay the debt accumulated when purchasing with credit cards. In turn, this make lot of Americans to increase in debt and finally to be unable to repay, causing problems with the economic balance and with personal credit too.
The real problem with credit cards is that the owed amounts must be paid back, this way the higher costs accumulated since the initial purchase could be avoided as well as the high interest rates of credit cards.

As a conclusion, credit cards could be considered the best friends as long as they are used in a right manner and the payments are made without getting in debt.