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The Jesse Mecham Show

Paid In Full, But Always in Debt

The Jesse Mecham Show

YNAB

Kids & Family, Education

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jesse continues his rant about exploration of credit card use, observing that "paid in full" users are, technically, always in debt. Paid in full users are people who have the cash at any moment to pay off their credit card balance in full, but choose to pay off the balance before the next billing cycle. While they do pay off the balance regularly (monthly, or weekly, maybe even daily), and thus never incur interest, they are in debt until the moment they pay off the balance. And of course, after they have paid off the balance, they are again in debt as soon as they charge the next expense on their credit card.

 

Does the distinction matter though? Jesse ponders the question, and gives an update on his own experiment of only using a debit card for expenses in 2023.

 

Got a question for Jesse? Send him an email:

askjesse@ynab.com

 

Sign up for a free 34-day trial of YNAB at www.youneedabudget.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, WineAppers. My name is Jesse Mekum with another episode of WineApp, where we teach

0:08.9

you four rules to help you stop it from paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt and save more

0:13.0

money. I'm going to say something that's going to bug some of you. I don't know if this

0:18.1

is a thing outside of WineApp or just inside WineApp, but we will often talk about users

0:22.9

who are, quote, paid in full, and we'll use the acronym of PIF, perhaps. And what that

0:30.2

means is, and you can probably guess it, you have the cash at any moment, at any moment,

0:36.9

someone could just say, pay your card, and you have the cash and you pay it. No big deal.

0:42.0

And that's it. So you are paid in full. And it kind of means it's this way of operating

0:46.2

with a credit card, where in surprise prizes is what I'm talking about. But it's a way

0:51.2

of operating with a credit card, where you have all of your cash and you're not spending

0:54.7

more than the cash you have on hand. You just happen to be using a credit card as your

0:58.2

spending vehicle. And this is what WineApp excels at. There's some things that we're hoping

1:03.8

to be able to fix with, like, some confusing, almost bugs or edge cases in the algorithm

1:09.1

that where we handle credit cards. But those aside, when everything's just kind of working

1:15.9

and you're never spending more cash than you actually have, WineApp is brilliantly

1:20.4

good at just kind of being like, hey, it's like it's all cash. It's just all cash. It's

1:26.7

all good. And this allows you then to say, well, it doesn't matter what spending implement

1:34.4

I use, I'm just going to, you know, end up spending what my budget says. And that's

1:42.6

that. You don't even notice. Yeah, you have to make an extra credit card payment. You

1:48.6

know, your checking account has a credit card payment that's kind of always pending, but

1:53.5

that's not a big deal. As Neil works for us, he pointed out, hey, a lot of your stuff

1:57.9

in your, you know, in your checking account is already spoken for. And in a sense, that's

...

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