Why Demat/Stock Market Brokers don't support Credit Card Payin
"Most credit cards allow you to take ""cash advances"", but the fees and limits for cash advances are different than for regular purchases. You can buy stock after taking a cash advance from your credit card. When you make a cash advance, you normally pay the credit card company a fee. When you make a regular purchase, the merchant (ie, the stockbroker) pays a fee. Additionally, credit card companies can make merchants wait up to 3 months to actually receive the money, in case the transaction is disputed. Your stockbroker is unlikely to want to pay the fee, accept the delay in receiving the funds, and risking that you will dispute the transaction. Having said that, many FOREX brokers will accept credit card deposits (treated as purchases), although FOREX can be considerably riskier than the stock market. Of course, if you max out your credit cards and lose all your money, you can normally negotiate to pay back the debt for less than the original amount, especially since it's unsecured debt."
Yes, they're referring to the credit card dispute (chargeback) process. In the case of dispute, credit card company will refund/freeze your charge so you don't have to pay until the dispute is resolved (or at all, if resolved in your favor). If the dispute is resolved in your favor, your credit card company will charge back the merchant's service provider which in turn will charge back (if it can) the merchant itself. So the one taking the most risk in this scenario is the merchant provider, this is why merchants that are high risk pay significantly higher fees or get dropped. "As Mr. Money Money Mustache once said: IF YOU HAVE CREDIT CARD DEBT, YOU SHOULD FEEL LIKE YOUR HAIR IS ON   FIRE Student loan debt is different than credit card debt.  Rather than having spent the money on just about anything, it was invested in improving yourself and probably your financial future.  This was probably a good decision. However, unlike most credit card debt, if you ever have to file for bankruptcy, your student loans will not be erased.  They will follow you forever. Pay your debts off as quickly as you can.  While it may be true that ""long-term return on the stock market is about 7%"", you cannot assume that this will always be the case, especially in the short term.  What if you had made this assumption in 2007? To assume that your stocks will beat a 6.4% guaranteed return over the next few years is not really investing.  It's gambling." "I don't like buying individual bonds for my own portfolio.  I actually used to buy long-term government strip bonds (Canadas or provincial bonds) but I stopped.  Here are some reasons why: My broker allows me to purchase bonds via their web application.  However, to sell a bond, I had to call in to the fixed-income trading desk.  That was inconvenient.  (But your broker may be different.) Bonds don't typically trade on a formal exchange.  So, there's no cheap & easy way (as far as I know) to get an independent quote for a bond's value – I had to trust what my broker said my bond was worth when assessing my portfolio performance.   I asked my broker once how they arrive at the ""market value"" shown – i.e. whether it was last bid, ask, or actual trade – and I was told they use a third party bond quotation / valuation information provider for the data, and that quotes are an estimate of what the bond would be worth, based on similar bonds.  I quickly learned that wasn't the value I could actually get when selling it: When you're dealing with your broker to buy and sell bonds, you're likely dealing with theirs or a related investment bank which makes a market for specific issues of bonds.  While I wasn't being charged an explicit commission to buy or sell bonds, it was evident the broker makes money off the spread:  That is, the difference between what they would be willing to sell a bond for and what they would be willing to buy that same bond for.  They will buy your bond back from you cheaper than what they could turn around and sell it to somebody else for.  That's why they don't charge an explicit commission... it's built in and hidden! Anyway, when I finally discovered my broker would seldom actually offer me the ""market value"" quoted for my bonds (typically, it would be bought back for a few percent less than it were theoretically worth), I gave up.  I don't think bonds simply are liquid enough, nor the costs transparent enough for retail investors.  (Or maybe it's just me :-) However, I do think bonds remain an important part of a diversified portfolio:  Bonds ought to be represented in a diversified portfolio using low-cost bond index mutual funds or exchange-traded funds.  Since these funds buy & sell bonds in large quantities, they get a better deal on the spreads.  So, while you do pay an explicit management fee for a fund, you are probably saving since you're not getting shafted on the spreads." The short answer is that there are no great personal finance programs out there any more. In the past, I found Microsoft Money to be slick and feature rich but unfortunately it has been discontinued a few years ago.  Your choices now are Quicken and Mint along with the several open-source programs that have been listed by others. In the past, I found the open source programs to be both clunky and not feature-complete for my every day use. It's possible they have improved significantly since I had last looked at them. The biggest limitation I saw with them is weakness of integration with financial service providers (banks, credit card companies, brokerage accounts, etc.) Let's start with Mint. Mint is a web-based tool (owned by the same company as Quicken) whose main feature is its ability to connect to nearly every financial institution you're likely to use. Mint aggregates that data for you and presents it on the homepage. This makes it very easy to see your net worth and changes to it over time, spending trends, track your progress on budgets and long-term goals, etc. Mint allows you to do all of this with little or no data entry. It has support for your investments but does not allow for deep analysis of them. Quicken is a desktop program. It is extremely feature rich in terms of supporting different types of accounts, transactions, reports, reconciliation, etc. One could use Quicken to do everything that I just described about Mint, but the power of Quicken is in its more manual features. For example, while Mint is centred on showing you your status, Quicken allows you to enter transactions in real-time (as you're writing a check, initiating a transfer, etc) and later reconciles them with data from your financial institutions. Link Mint, Quicken has good integration with financial companies so you can generally get away with as little or as much data entry as you want. For example, you can manually enter large checks and transfers (and later match to automatically-downloaded data) but allow small entries like credit card purchases to download automatically.  Bottom line, if you're just looking to keep track of where you are at, try Mint. It's very simple and free. If you need more power and want to manage your finances on a more transactional level, try Quicken (though I believe they do not have a trial version, I don't understand why). The learning curve is steep although probably gentler than that of GnuCash. Last note on why Mint.com is free: it's the usual ad-supported model, plus Mint sells aggregated consumer behaviour reports to other institutions (since Mint has everyone's transactions, it can identify consumer trends). If you're not comfortable with that, or with the idea of giving a website passwords to all your financial accounts, you will find Quicken easier to accept. Hope this helps. From experience, Mastercard and Visa charge vendors about the same (around 2%-5%) while American Express and Diners Club are astonishingly expensive (6%-10%) and you'll find that few small retailers are very comfortable accepting these. The variation comes from the volume of trade that vendors provide.  A big retailer will negotiate a very low rate while smaller businesses will be hit with higher charges. You'll have to take cash from your Credit Card account and use that to trade. I doubt any brokerage house will take credit cards as it's trading without any collateral (since credit cards are an unsecured credit) I'm surprised by all the pro-credit answers here, debit has some definite advantages. Most importantly, when you pay with a credit card, the merchant pays around 3% of the transaction to the credit company. In many states, they are forced to charge you the same amount, and this is frequently toted as ''consumer protection''. But consider what this means for the business: they loose money for every credit transaction, and they're legally forbidden to do anything about it. So you're taking 3% from a business and handing it over to a massive cooperation.  To make matters worse, the buisness is inevitably going to have to raise their prices (albiet by a small amount), so in the end the average consumer has gained nothing. On the other hand, the credit card company wins big, and they use their profits to pay lobbyists and lawyers to keep these rules in place. To put in the worst possible light, it's essentially legal extortion, verging on corruption. As for the fraud protection offered, while it may be true that credit cards will offer a more hassle-free reimbursement (i.e. you just don't have to pay the bill) if your card is stolen, consumer protection laws also extend to debit: in many cases your bank is legally required to cut you a check for all the money you lost. Some large merchants do not give discounts for cash payments as this does not work out any cheaper for them, vs Credit Card payments. In Credit Card typically fees given to all the 3 parties (Merchant bank, Issuer Bank and Visa) would be around 3%. If cash payment is made, and the amounts are large (say at Walmart / K-Mart they have to deposit such cash at Banks, Have a provision to Storing Cash at Stores, People to count the cash. So essentially they will have to pay for Cash Officer to count,  Bigger Safe to store, Transport & Security & Insurance to take Cash to Bank Plus Banks charge around 1% charge for counting the large cash being deposited. This cash would be in local branch where as the operations are centralized and Walmart/K-Mart would need the money in central account, it takes time to get it transferred to a central account, and there is a fee charged by Bank to do this automatically. On the other hand, smaller merchants would like cash as they are operated stand-alone and most of their purchases are also cash. Hence they would tend to give a discount for cash payment if any.