5 Tips To Getting Your First Credit Card

All right, so you're ready to apply for your very first credit card, but what the heck do you look for when you're trying to get a piece of plastic? I'm about to tell you five tips that you need to know before you choose your first credit card. Hey guys, it's Justine with Debt Free Millennials, the channel for all things millennial, money, and debt-free living. You wanna be debt-free, right? By subscribing to the channel, you'll be the first to know when I have a new video out, so go ahead, click that subscribe button right now. Okay, so we're gonna be talking about the top five tips that you need to know when choosing a credit card. All right, so you're gonna be choosing a credit card for the very first time. Submitting the application can be a little scary, especially if you've been living a cash-only life forever. So a couple of things that you might wanna take a look into before you hit that application form is, number one, check out whether or not the card that you're interested in has an annual membership fee. Membership fees associated with credit cards oftentimes will give you additional perks. So if you're not ready to be a big, let's say, avid traveler or travel internationally, sometimes cards with those types of perks come with an annual membership fee, so you'll probably wanna avoid that for your very first card. Cards like Chase Freedom have $0 membership fees, and that would be a really good place to begin with. So definitely check out if there are annual membership fees. The second thing that you'll want to take a look into is, is the customer service actually legit? So what I did, if you guys have watched when I talked about how to choose a really good savings account, is whether or not the customer service support is there and you can access it whenever. So what you can do is, prior to actually applying with that credit card, is call up their customer support line and see whether or not you can get to a live person. If you can get to a live person within three minutes, you are golden. Next, you'll wanna check out when the payment is due. Whether it's due on the first of the month or the 30th of the month, you need to know that you have to hit those payments consistently every single month. That is the only way you are going to be responsible with credit cards. So if the payment is due on the 20th day of every month and that doesn't work for you, then you can simply call customer support and ask them to switch the due date. Next, select a credit card based on your lifestyle. Do you really like to travel? Are you looking to get some cash back for transactions that you make every day? Or maybe you'd like to really increase points so that you can award yourself with a free trip at the end of the year. There are credit cards for literally everything. So you can choose one that's based upon your lifestyle and what you'd like to do. Let's say you travel a lot for work and you're constantly having to put airline reservations on your own card and then you get reimbursed for that. Well, why not pick up a credit card that has an airline tied to it so that you can start gaining those frequent flyer points even more and doubling those points by putting it on the card so that you can reward yourself with a trip later. I think that's a great win-win. You can actually do this with the Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card. And if you like to fly that airline, they actually partnered with Chase to provide these credit cards so that as you are flying with Southwest, you're actually getting double points for every time you book a trip through them. So it's definitely a card worth checking out. The last tip is, this is gonna sound really weird, but the user interface. If you can't navigate through the dashboard and figure out how to even frickin' pay your bill or look at the transaction statements, which I do every single month because that's how I budget, then it's likely not going to be a credit card that you're going to stick around with for the long run. And you're going to want to make sure that everything from the website homepage down to the login area is very crystal clear on where you need to go to either find customer support or look at your transaction statements, pay your bill, et cetera, and even access your rewards dashboard because that's the whole reason why we're taking advantage of this system. Okay, so those are my five tips for choosing your first credit card. I want to give a shout out to Flynn the Trash Bin who gave me a comment on the channel. Thanks so much for asking me to do this video. I hope these tips are really helpful and that you have the tools in place to choose the right credit card for your very first time.