Imagine you had a credit card was a $500 limit, and in the run-up to Christmas, you nearly maxed out your card. Before taking that last shopping trip of the season, you went online to check your balance and saw that you had $19 of available credit. “No matter,” you say to yourself, “I’ll pay the balance in full when I get my Christmas bonus from the office.” The only other charge you made was for a couple of mochachinos at the local coffee house, but two days later you were shocked to learn that you somehow went over your credit limit! Worse yet, your card company hit you with a $29 fee! The Mochachino That Broke the Camel’s Back
This can happen a lot easier than you might expect. In the above example, you may have recently “paid at the pump.” Oftentimes a gas station charges your card only $1 at the point-of-purchase and applies the remainder of the charge to your card later that day (or the next day). Let’s say you had $17 in gas that you forgot about. That would reduce your available credit to $3 ($19 – $17 + $1 for the refunding of the temporary charge). Then when you bought two $2.50 drinks, you pushed your...