This is the Ramsey Call of the Day, part of the Ramsey Network.

Today's question comes from Diane in Arizona.

My husband and I are in Baby Step 2 and are working hard to pay off our debt.

The one issue we struggle with is not using credit cards.

We use them to pay our utilities, groceries, and other monthly bills, but we never carry a balance.

By doing this, we're able to travel for vacations for free using our points.

What's wrong with doing this if we're not going into more debt? The age old question, Dave.

The age old question. We've been exploring this topic on the fine print because it's one of the

biggest objections we get here at Ramsey. People are going, well, Dave, I pay off my card every month.

I get some free stuff. What's the harm? Right. So we should clue in Bank of America and Chase what portion of their marketing is working the best,

and it is this crap.

The vacations, the points.

This is the one that's got people believing in stupidity still after all this time. Yeah. And here's what happens. And you can listen to

the true cost of credit card rewards. This is the second fine print episode that we released. And we dug

into this with an ex-capital one insider. Okay. What did they say? She said they run 10,000

experiments a year on people to figure out what's going to get them to spend

more, to use the points.

And one of the biggest ways they do it is through the points.

Because you know how the points work.

They don't say it's $500.

They say you're going to get $128,000 that you can use to redeem flights that cost $74,000.

And the points change every day.

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