Money and Marriage: How You Use Credit Cards

Disagreements over credit card use has caused more than one marital disagreement - and money issues in general have caused many more than one divorce. The best course of action is to come to agreement before the fight starts.

The first thing couples should agree upon is how much debt they can handle. One spouse may be comfortable owing many thousands, while the other panics at the thought of a $200 credit card balance.

Talk about it. Look at your combined income and your other debt - such as car or house payments, and then decide if you want to have yet another monthly debt. Consider your monthly expenses for food, utilities, gasoline, etc. and see how much "extra" you have left over to pay on a credit card bill. Of that extra, how much do you want to spend on extras such as entertainment or an evening on the town?

Remember, if you use your credit card for a large purchase and have a debt to pay, making only the minimum payment will keep you paying for many years. So talk about how many months (years?) you want to spend paying for that new stereo system before you decide to put it on your credit card.

If you are in a position to deduct expenses such as gasoline and restaurant meals, it could be a good bookkeeping tool to use one credit card exclusively for those purchases and pay the statement in full each month. But then you need to resist the temptation to let those charges build up when you'd rather use the money for a mini-vacation or a new wardrobe.

If you are good money managers, you can use your rewards credit cards for all monthly expenses - groceries, gasoline, clothing, restaurant meals, etc. and get the benefit of rewards points. But the benefit of those points will disappear if you fail to pay the statement(s) in full each month.

Those rewards points can become another source of disagreement. If one of you looks forward to cashing them in on a new toy and the other assumes that you'll use them to pay down debt, you have a problem. Before you have points to cash, discuss what you're going to do with them.

One other thing to remember - ego should not play a part in deciding who pays the bills. The person who is most organized and most apt to get payments sent on time should be in charge. You should both go over the bills and discuss your spending, but when no one person is in charge of payment, the result could be late fees - and a drop in your credit scores.