Credit cards have always been a bit baffling to me if I'm being honest.

And I think that's because credit cards have kind of been vilified in films and TV as this slippery

slope of spending that makes us believe we can buy anything we want until we

can't and we're in even deeper financial trouble than before we had the credit card.

Take the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic as a prime example.

The opening scene talks about these beautiful women who have beautiful things and they

don't even need money because they use quote

magic cards. Credit cards.

Eventually in the film this obsession with credit cards leads our heroin into $16,000 worth of debt.

When a story wants to show us that someone is in for difficult times ahead,

there's this classic scene where their credit card is declined, and that's our first signal that a character is about to hit financial rock bottom.

We're constantly presented with these storylines that portray credit cards as these proverbial financial poison apples.

But according to a report from the Federal Reserve System on the economic well-being of the U.S. household

in 2021, 84 percent of U.S. adults have and use credit cards.

So it begs the question, are credit cards all bad if so many people have them?

I know we have to be careful about accruing debt, but can credit cards also help us achieve good financial standing?

Also, if someone could tell me how to get the most out of the rewards on my card, that would be great.

Let's figure it all out together and start taking notes because this is

Grown up stuff.

Welcome to another episode of Grown Up Stuff Had We Adult. Now Matt, when we first brought

up covering credit cards and credit, You were very enthusiastic about this and it was

surprising as it's not usually something that gets my blood pumping and I want to

...