How frequently should I request additional credit?
"I don't know of a guideline to how often you can ask for an increase. You can ask as often as you like. As for consequences, refer to Is there a downside to asking for a credit increase?, where the consensus is that, aside from a possible (temporary) hard pull on your credit report, there's probably no risk to asking. Depending on your credit score/history, and especially in the current economy, you may get ""no"" as an answer most often. You can try talking to your card's Credit Department or even Customer Retention Department as they may have more leverage. They may say yes or no or that they need to review your account. When you do ask for an increase, I would make sure to ask if there will be a hard pull on your report, if there is any cost or downside to applying, and to make sure that this would be an increase to your current credit line, not a new account." I do this all the time, my credit rating over time plotted on a graph looks like saw blades going upward on a slope I use a credit alert service to get my credit reports quarterly, and I know when the credit agencies update their files (every three months), so I never have a high balance at those particular times Basically, I use the negative hard pulls to propel my credit score upwards with a the consequentially lowered credit utilization ratio, and the credit history. So here is how it works for me, but I am not an impulse buyer and I wouldn't recommend it for most people as I have seen spending habits: Month 1: charge cards, pay minimum balance (raises score multiple points) Month 2: PAY OFF ALL CREDIT CARDS, massive deleveraging using actual money I already have (raises score multiple points) Month 3: get credit report showing low balance, charge cards, pay minimum balance ask for extensions of credit, AND followup on new credit line offers (lowers score several points per credit inquiry) Month 4: charge cards, pay minimum balance, discretionally approving hard pulls - always have room for one or two random hard pulls, such as for a new cell phone contract, or renting a car, or employment, etc Month 5: PAY OFF CREDIT CARDS using actual money you have. (the trick is to NEVER really go above a 15% credit utilization ratio, and to never overleverage. Tricky because very quickly you will get enough credit to go bankrupt) Month 6: get credit report showing low balances, a slight dip in score from last quarter, but still high continue.
"Trying to figure out how much money you have available each day sounds like you're making this more complicated than it needs to be. Unless you're extremely tight and you're trying to squeeze by day by day, asking ""do I have enough cash to buy food for today?"" and so on, you're doing too much work. Here's what I do. I make a list of all my bills. Some are a fixed amount every month, like the mortgage and insurance premiums. Others are variable, like electric and heating bills, but still pretty predictable.  Most bills are monthly, but I have a few that come less frequently, like water bills in my area come every 3 months and I have to pay property taxes twice a year. For these you have to calculate how much they cost each month. Like for the water bill, it's once every 3 months so I divide a typical bill by 3. Always round up or estimate a little high to be safe. Groceries are a little tricky because I don't buy groceries on any regular schedule, and sometimes I buy a whole bunch at once and other times just a few things. When groceries were a bigger share of my income, I kept track of what I spent for a couple of months to figure out an average per month. (Today I'm a little richer and I just think of groceries as coming from my spending money.) I allocate a percentage of my income for contributions to church and charities and count this just like bills. It's a good idea to put aside something for savings and/or paying down any outstanding loans every month. Then I add these up to say okay, here's how much I need each month to pay the bills. Subtract that from my monthly income and that's what I have for spending money. I get paid twice a month so I generally pay bills when I get paid. For most bills the due date is far enough ahead that I can wait the maximum half a month to pay it. (Worst case the bill comes the day after I pay the bills from this paycheck.)  Then I keep enough money in my checking account to, (a) Cover any bills until the next paycheck and allow for the particularly large bills; and (b) provide some cushion in case I make a mistake -- forget to record a check or make an arithmetic error or whatever; and (c) provide some cushion for short-term unexpected expenses. To be safe, (a) should be the total of your bills for a month, or as close to that as you can manage. (b) should be a couple of hundred dollars if you can manage it, more if you make a lot of mistakes. If you've calculated your expenses properly and only spend the difference, keeping enough money in the bank should fall out naturally. I think it's a lot easier to try to manage your money on a monthly basis than on a daily basis. Most of us don't spend money every day, and we spend wildly different amounts from day to day. Most days I probably spend zero, but then one day I'll buy a new TV or computer and spend hundreds.  Update in response to question What I do in real life is this: To calculate my available cash to spend, I simply take the balance in my checking account -- assuming that all checks and electronic payments have cleared. My mortgage is deducted from my checking every month so I post that to my checking a month in advance. I pay a lot of things with automatic charges to a credit card these days, so my credit card bills are large and can't be ignored. So subtract my credit card balances. Subtract my reserve amount. What's left is how much I can afford to spend. So for example: Say I look at the balance in my checkbook today and it's, say, $3000. That's the balance after any checks and other transactions have cleared, and after subtracting my next mortgage payment. Then I subtract what I owe on credit cards. Let's say that was $1,200. So that leaves $1,800. I try to keep a reserve of $1,500. That's plenty to pay my routine monthly bills and leave a healthy reserve. So subtract another $1,500 leaves $300. That's how much I can spend. I could keep track of this with a spreadsheet or a database but what would that gain? The amount in my checking account is actual money. Any spreadsheet could accumulate errors and get farther and farther from accurate values. I use a spreadsheet to figure out how much spending money I should have each month, but that's just to use as a guideline. If it came to, say, $100, I wouldn't make grandiose plans about buying a new Mercedes. If it came to $5,000 a month than buying a fancy new car might be realistic. It also tells me how much I can spend without having to carefully check balances and add it up. These days I have a fair amount of spending money so when, for example, I recently decided I wanted to buy some software that cost $100 I just bought it with barely a second thought. When my spending money was more like $100 a month, lunch at a fast food place was a big event that I planned weeks in advance. (Obviously, I hope, don't get stupid about ""small amounts"". If you can easily afford $100 for an impulse purchase, that doesn't mean that you can afford $100 five times a day every day.) Two caveats: 1. It helps to have a limited number of credit cards so you can keep the balances under control. I have two credit cards I use for almost everything, so I only have two balances to keep track of. I used to have more and it got confusing, it was easy to lose track of how much I really owed, which is a set up for getting in trouble." Well I guess I'm going to throw a curveball from what others have said so far. I have an entry level FP&amp;A job at a medium-ish ($600M rev) size company. I use SQL all. the. time. We get a lot of data requests, and instead of shoveling them over to our tiny IT team who is more focused on development, we ourselves have to create and validate loads of SQL queries. For any recurring data requests, we throw the queries into a Power BI dashboard and do analytics off of it. My intuition is that smaller companies' FP&amp;A departments are going to overlap more with IT when it comes to data due to less rigidly defined internal structure, so knowing some of the tools IT uses can certainly help. Just knowing how to query company databases (if you can get access) saves days of waiting + back and forth with IT.  If you use SQL and Excel, you'll become familiar with power query, which is a useful timesaver for automatically transforming raw data. A natural extension to SQL would then be analytical software or programming like R. Companies like the one I work for are trying to figure out business intelligence, and we've implemented suites of PBI dashboards, which requires an understanding of Dax (which is only different enough from VB to be annoying IMO).  Be a wizard at Excel, which I'm sure you already know. Know how to apply conditional formatting 46 different ways, know how to quickly create and manipulate pivot charts in addition to being a god of pivot table manipulation. Know how to automate repetitive tasks. A big one (for me) is know how to do reconciliation quickly using Excel (FP&amp;A does a lot of recon at my work). Knowing how to cleverly apply and manipulate pivot tables and v-lookups can be the difference between spending 4 and 40 hours doing recon.  Note that these suggestions come from my experience alone. "I guess I don't understand how you figure that taking out a car loan for $20k will result in adding $20k in equity.  A car loan is a liability, not an asset like your $100k in cash.  Besides, you don't get a dollar-for-dollar consideration when figuring a car's value against the loan it is encumbered by.  In other words, the car is only worth what someone's willing to pay for it, not what your loan amount on it is. Remember that taking on a loan will increase your debt-to-income ratio, which is always a factor when trying to obtain a mortgage.  At the same time, taking on new debt just prior to shopping for a mortgage could make it more difficult to find a lender.  Every time a credit report (hard inquiry) is run on you, it temporarily impacts your credit score.  The only exception to this rule is when it comes to mortgages.  In the U.S., the way it works is that once you start shopping for a mortgage with lenders, for the next 30 days, additional inquiries into your credit report for purposes of mortgage funding do not count against your credit score, so it's a ""freebie"" in a way.  You can't use this to shop for any other kind of credit, but the purpose is to allow you a chance to shop for the best mortgage rate you can get without adversely impacting your credit. In the end, my advice is to stop looking at how much house you can buy, and instead focus on a house with payments you can live with and afford.  Trying to buy the most house based on what someone's willing to lend you leaves no room in the near-term for being able to borrow if the property has some repair needs, you want to furnish/upgrade it, or for any other unanticipated need which may arise that requires credit.  Don't paint yourself into a corner.  Just because you can borrow big doesn't mean you should borrow big. I hope this helps. Good luck!" Account statements and the account information provided by your personal finance software should be coming from the same source, namely your bank's internal accounting records. So in theory one is just as good as the other. That being said, an account statement is a snapshot of your account on the date the statement was created, while synchronizations with your personal finance application is dynamically generated upon request (usually once a day or upon login).  So what are the implications of this? Your account statement will not show transactions that may have taken place during that period but weren't posted until after the period ended (common with credit card transactions and checks). Instead they'd appear on the next statement. Because electronic account synchronizations are more frequent and not limited to a specific time period those transactions will show up shortly after they are posted. So it is far easier to keep track of your accounts electronically. Every personal finance software I've ever used supports manual entries so what I like to do is on a daily basis I manually enter any transaction which wasn't posted automatically. This usually only takes a few minutes each evening. Then when the transaction eventually shows up it's usually reconciled with my manually entered one automatically.  Aside from finding (infrequent) bank errors this has the benefit of keeping me aware of how much I'm spending and how much I have left. I've also caught a number of cashier errors this way (noticing I was double-charged for an item while entering the receipt total) and its the best defense against fraud and identity theft I can think of. If you're looking at your accounts on a daily basis you're far more likely to notice an unusual transaction than any monitoring service. Well to start with I would make sure that the interest total you are collecting each month is greater than the interest total you are paying each month on your credit card debt.  So if you have $200 a month in interest you pay the credit card company I would make sure that the interest you collect on the loan is more than $200 a month.  And make sure that you use some portion of the principle payment to pay down the credit card debt so that you are still even or ahead of the interest you owe the credit card company. Beyond that I would want the rate to be higher than the borrower could expect from a bank.  This will incentivize the borrower to either pay it off early or refinance the loan through a bank effectively paying it off early for you.  Anything that shifts the risk off of you and onto someone else is in your favor here. You could also implement some sort of final payment fee and reduce this fee by a certain amount (presumably up to 100%) if it is paid off early.  I would graduate that amount so there is still incentive if the buyer misses the original date but still incentive to meet the date.  If the loan was for 10 years then I would probably do around .5% per year early.   I would also get an attorney to draw up the loan paperwork to make sure that you(and potentially your heirs) are covered should you need to recover from a default, bankruptcy, or other potential problems.  I would bet the lawyer fees will save you 5x+ the amount if only in headaches.  And if you are dealing with family the lawyer makes a great fall guy to say I wish I could do that but the lawyer won't let me if the family member tries to take advantage. It used to be quite easy for students to get credit cards. When I was in college in the early 1980s, credit card companies set up tables in the student center and offered low-limit cards along with free t-shirts on an almost daily schedule. The Credit CARD Act of 2009 made this much more difficult for banks. If you have a bank or credit union account, the first thing I would do is talk to them about getting a card. Some banks offer a VISA Student Card specifically for college students. My daughter was able to get one when she turned 18, just before starting college. The credit limit is very low ($200 for freshmen, increasing each year until the limit is $500 during senior year). After graduation, it converts to a regular VISA account with a limit that depends on post-graduation income and the now established 4 years of credit history. The VISA web site has a list of banks offering this type of card. Now I will give you the same unsolicited advice I gave my daughter, and the same advice I think most others here would give you. For building credit, this kind of card is excellent, but you should still use it very sparingly, and pay off the balance every month. Make it a hard rule to never pay interest on a credit card bill. I told her to charge perhaps one or two purchases totaling no more than $25-$50 each month, and pay them off as soon as the statement arrives. This is much easier if you have a deposit account at the same bank, since you will be able to pay the bill instantly on line. Have your employer direct deposit your paychecks into that bank account, if at all possible. There are two very small catches. You have just increased your available credit.  In some cases when you want to make a loan, they will check your available credit against your creditworthiness (your income and credit history). In the short term with a greater credit limit, you may have more difficulty getting a large loan.  On the other hand, your greater credit limit will make you seem more creditworthy (as you have been walking around with the ability to borrow a whole pile and demonstrated the ability to not go bankrupt). The other possible catch is that if something goes wrong and your credit line is maxed (maybe you have a psychotic episode; maybe you give your credit card and pin number to someone who buys a car on you), your liability is larger. If you can maintain spending discipline and don't need every ounce of credit head room right now, neither of these apply.  In the medium to long term, a lower credit utilization and a higher total limit will make you more creditworthy. I had a car loan through GMAC and extra money was applied to future payments.   At one point, I received a statement telling me I had 15 months until my next payment was due because I had not marked extra payments as going to principal.