Is It Bad To Have A Lot Of Credit Cards

Is it bad to have a lot of credit cards? Let's talk about that. You know there's a liberating experience to get a brand new credit card in your wallet. There's a very specific amount to get good credit and I can tell you that first 40 to 50 days is so important that you use your credit cards right. So get a pen and paper. Let's begin. So we're going to talk about three specific things. Number one, how do you qualify for a card and which is the proper card? Which should be your first card? And that's going to be a little bit of a conversation. And then number three, which is probably the most important point to all of this, is how do you maintain proper credit? How do you grow credit? And how do you get, you know, I've got clients got millions of dollars of lines of credit done right. So if you're interested in getting any of this kind of money, get a pen and paper. Like I said, we got a lot to talk about. First let's talk about how do you qualify for a Now I started the application and actually I'm going to start even before. If you're a parent out there listening, you've got to go get my book, MakeYourKidsMillionaires.com. We talk in thorough detail. But really around 13 and 14, you need to start introducing your kids to debit and credit cards. They should at least have a checking account by then. And really, if they're a responsible nine-year-old, I'd say give and take it from them. But if they want to go out there with their friends, give them a debit card, have them understand how that's going to work. Debit cards, remember, come straight out of your bank account. Very useless, useless. I actually, I get my clients more sophisticated and tell them to put their darn debit card away because it's not helping you. It takes money straight out of your bank account versus use a credit card. When you use a credit card, right, you have 30 days to use the bank's money. American Express, Citibank, whoever you're using, you're going to use their money for 30 days. The benefit of using somebody else's money is one thing, but the best is it increased, that affects your credit. And the more you use it, we'll talk about proper use in a moment, the better your credit gets. That same principle is going to apply when you have a company. So if you have an LLC, an S Corp, a C Corp, they can have their own credit cards and they can have their own corporate credit. So I have clients literally that have 15 companies. So they have their own personal credit score, which is under the social security number. And they have company number one, number two, number three, number four, their own tax ID, their own employee identification number, their own credit card numbers unattached to a personal guarantee. So when I hear people say, oh, I can't get money and I don't have good credit cards because you don't know what you're doing. And a lot of this information out on the internet, it's wrong. And it's not telling you accurately how to not only get a card, how to properly use it, how to, and how many to get. So let's keep going. So how do you qualify? First of all, start young. And if you're already older, well, you are here. So it starts with the application and the application has to have income. So many of you, you're applying for cards out of the energy of desperation, like, oh my gosh, I have to get some money versus I'm going to get money because I'm going to make business investments. I'm going to make, you know, I might have to buy some capital expenditures, might have to buy furniture, might have to buy some computers, might have to buy some other equipment. So you can use all of that, use other people's money. That's 30 days of spending someone else's money. And yes, you need to pay it all off at the end of 30 days after your statement arrives. And that's going to help you get better credit. So in the application, you want to put projected income. Now they're not going to ask you for projected income, but I promise you, I work with a lot of student athletes and they're putting in zero. They said, I'm a student. Well, then you're getting a student secured card. And so those of you who went through bankruptcy or foreclosures or things like that, you're going to, you're going to have to rebuild your credit, getting secured cards, which means you put a thousand down. They're going to give you a card and you get a thousand. That's a better card to use because you're rebuilding your credit than a debit card. See, a lot of you, you keep using your debit card. Like it's the end all be all. It is nothing. Put it away. Stop using it. Stop pulling money straight out of your bank account. ATMs, what? I mean, talk about a great investment for the people who actually fund them. The rest of you, you're paying ridiculous rates and women, you tend to take $40, 20 or $40 out, but you pay $3. You know what that interest payment is? It's crazy fees, right? So get a credit card, even just cured cards better. So back to my student athletes, I'll tell them if they're on scholarship, they're making, let's say anywhere between 800 to $1,200 a month. And then they have NIDLs, which is name, image, and likeness. So most of my guys I'm working with are getting something from a glass company, a sportswear company, bar stools taken on a lot of these athletes, subway, whatever that money needs to go into a company though, not to your individual benefit, but in that company gets its own credit. So in the application, you're going to put your projected revenue and have it be 18,000, 24,000. I have clients that actually have an amazing business plan and they are going to make 120 to 140,000 this year. So you're going to put that into the application, especially right now. Capital One seems to be the one giving the best range of credit. Discover's good, American Express is good. So it starts with your application, but here's the other point in that timeframe. You want to apply for a variety of cards all at one time because they're going to do a hard credit pull. So if you apply one week, one another week, one another week, and then you also go for a car loan or something else, your credit's going to drop. I have a client just recently spread out the request for cards and a loan, seven or eight weeks, dropped 90 points in his credit. So do it all within a compressed, do it the same day, ideally. Use the same application, use the same dollar amount. They're going to compare notes. So if you say you're going to make a hundred thousand, put a hundred thousand across all applications, do it all in a compressed time. And I'm going to tell you, you're ready to go for four to six cards all at one time. And then you're going to start using them. Now, if you only get three within six months, do it again and go after another three, four. Ultimately what you want is a rotation of four to seven credit cards. A lot of you are using two cards and it's not enough to impact your credit history. So ideally here's best form. Minimum you have four credit cards. And I'm saying this because it's an easy example. There's four weeks in a month. So you're going to use credit card number one and week one, you're going to pay it off. So you're going to use it for 30 days, pay it off. Week two, you're going to use that card and then you're going to continue to pay that off week two. You're going to pay off week three and week four. In the between, you're going to keep using them. The point is you always want money in the financial system. You never want to be debt-free. When a financial institution looks at you and you're debt-free and there's no money moving and you're not making a lot of money, guess what? Your credit score goes down. Your credit worthiness, we call it, right? Having thin credit, we call it. It's not going to get you very far. When you make a lot of money and you spend a lot of money and it's in corporate structure and business structure, they're going to keep giving you lines of credit. My son went from 18 years old getting his first American Express and getting about a $25,000 limit to now he's 22 and he's got over a six-figure limit on one American Express card. And he's got company cards and he's doing the exact same thing I'm telling you. So never pay off your cards one day a month. And that's a huge lesson for a lot of you. You spend the 14th or the 15th or whatever day of the month, your statements come, you pay all bills on that time. Horrible plan. Start spreading out your spending, right? Notice not your savings or your budget, right? You want to pay bills every week, like just pick a day and pick a couple hours in a day or one hours in a week. One hour make every Friday you're going to pay bills or every Monday morning you're going to get up and you're going to pay. So you always have money floating in and out of the financial system as you look more viable, you're active, right? Financial institutes like active entrepreneurs and active individuals. So what happens if you don't use your credit? Well, your credit score is going down. So again, this is an active use with the financial systems. And if you ever go for a traditional loan, like you want to get a house loan, you want to get a car loan, which by the way, don't ever pay your car off. I mean, you can get 0% financing in a vehicle. Zero. Zero is free. So why would you take $80,000 and pay off a car? I had a client just recently went through a divorce and she had a Porsche leftover and they had a buyout and she had a bunch of money. So she paid off her Porsche. Is it $80,000? Are you kidding? You could have continued to finance. In fact, I'm going to make her go refinance it. She'll get it for about 1.8%. Now she gets her 80,000 back. Now she can invest it. Just say simple math is 10%. Now she can make 8,000 on her 80,000, keep the principal, still drive the car, make the minimum payments. You take some of the 8,000 and use that towards the payment of the car, but don't burn your principal. So many people, your inherited behavior and your thinking is I have to live debt free. No good debt is anything sub four. If you can get money that's under 4% and you can make 10, 12, 20, 30%, that's the arbitrage. You want to make sure you're investing your money. All your principal gets invested and you keep your good debt as low and lean as you can. But as far as credit cards, you want to be actively using your credit card. Put your debit card away. I know a lot of people are never, never even told you that. Your debit card doesn't help you. So another thing by using your credit cards, you get points and rewards. And believe me, they are bigger than you think. American Express Platinum is probably one of the biggest in the world that I've seen. Black even more. The black card for American Express, you get four to five points for hotels, for cars, for travel, for food, groceries. I mean, there's so many ways that you can pay for other life expenses. We traveled so much on our American Express corporate card for so many years. I still have 4 million points to use. I don't know. It could be a good business trip back to Africa or something fun. And I'm serious about that. A lot of you, you're not using your card enough. You're not using it strategically. You're not making sure you have your points, make sure they don't expire. All of it. It's active, right? But that's what financial institutes want. They want an active entrepreneur, an active person. Your credit will be highly rewarded. So I want to read a few things. This actually is some exact details. So there's one, two, three, four, six bullet points. So get a pen and paper. All right. So number one, six to seven cards with revolving lines of credit, right? That's kind of rule number one. Again, we talked about debit versus credit. Put your debit cards away. Only use your credit cards and never pay them off at one time. Use your debt wisely. Use it for good debt. Do not use it for bad debt. If you are using it because of lifestyle stuff, go make more money. If you don't know how to make more money, I'll teach you how to do that. Credit cards, again, are an option versus short-term loans. You don't have to go through the whole loan application. Interest rates on cards, if you do it right, you can keep your interest rates down to 0%. One, two, three. If it starts creeping up, do a balance transfer. There might be some fees in it, but you can balance back. Banks are competing for your dollars at all time. You have to be on the smart side of this, not the desperate side of this. And a lot of you, you're on the desperate side of how you're using your cards. Whenever you spend above your limits, you need to call. If you know that you're going to spend and you don't have the limits, call in advance. Tell them that you're doing a business investment, that you need to expand the limits, but you want your interest rate dropped. The first person on the phone will say, I can't do it. Say, I need to talk to a manager. And up level to another conversation and say, I'm doing business investing and I need to make an investment in equipment or whatever you need to do. And you need an extended line. If they say no, say, then I'll move my entire card. And if you've been spending $10,000, $20,000, I promise you they're not moving or you did the wrong script and you got desperate. Do never ever get desperate when you talk to credit card companies. And then the last one, again, on your balance transfers, just make sure you really watch your interest rates and the actual terms of the next card as you move into it. At all times, make sure you get your statements because that's what's going to affect your credit. Make sure you get your statement. Don't pay it off before. It doesn't even count. So follow it through all the way to 30 days. I wanted to go back to how I handle this with my kids. But before I do that, I want you to subscribe to our channel. If you're enjoying this and go up to the search bar and see what other content that you're interested in learning. If it's not there, go to the comments and put in the comments. What do you want me to talk about? I'm going to be here five days a week. You're going to be here with me. So hit the notification button and we're going to wake up together. I'm going to wake up to a video, 10 to 12 minutes of me teaching you something financially literate for you and your family. So the last thing I want to tell you is little techniques that I use for our kids. So until they're 18, they legally can't get a card. But the last thing you want to be is that parent who hands your kid a credit card and off to school or away they go from your household and no training. So around 13 or 14, I gave both my kids a credit card and then they're accountable for it. So we get the statement. They have to keep the receipts old school, either on their phone or they have to have them and they have to match them up. And if we didn't agree to the spend, it comes out of their monthly amount of money that they make. So they have to start reconciling. So they have to learn to do this early, 13, 14. This is all high school stuff. So when they're off to college, it's not like a freak out. It's oh my gosh. And then with kids, when they do go to college, here's what I did exactly with my son. We use one card called the Discover card for gas. We use the other one for just like personal things. We use another one for food and then we use another one for school supplies. So you kind of rotate those four and at least it gets them a little bit of credit. And even if they're only spending 20, $30 as a student on each card per month and they pay them off per month. I mean, you're going to go from usually normal students started about a 720 or 620 is kind of a normal. You're 18 and you're an adult. So you have 200 points to grow up to an 820. So just using that one technique of just assigning a card, it keeps it super easy. So if you as a parent want to know how much food did they spend? My son's a football player. I was shocked. He was spending 700 extra dollars a month. But he is a starting center. You need to gain 50 pounds. So we had to agree to a new term because he was spending so much money on food, nothing on gas, nothing on other personal stuff. I'm like, Logan, you got to balance out the spending a little bit. So there is some technique to growing a huge credit score, which then later in life, as you move into your twenties, you want to buy your first property. You've got amazing credit, which means you're going to get lower interest rates on your home loan. All this ties together when a financial institute looks at you. So before we complete, I want you to go to my financial personality quiz, take the quiz. You're going to end up in one of four profiles. I'm going to tell you some things to do to adjust and fix, especially those of you that are lifestyle junkies, which is a category. This video that I just shot is going to help you with that. And then after you fill out that profile, I'm going to send you an application to talk to one of our senior team members and let's see what we can do to help you out in coaching, mentoring you. I'm also with this going to throw in two tickets to my Millionaire Intensive and Marketplace. The reason I want to do that is those of you who are lifestyle people, you just need to make more money. Don't live within your means, just grow your means, but you got to make more money to have the life you want. So I'm going to give you two tickets for that. And we're going to talk tomorrow.