How Many Credit Cards Should You Have? Here's What The Ideal Number Can Be

Credit cards are often termed as a double-edged sword in the financial world. On one hand, they give a plethora of benefits such as reward points, cashbacks, discounts, no cost EMIs etc. On the other hand, careless usage and behavior often turns credit cards into a debt trap. Ultimately, it all depends upon how you use and repay credit cards, as this is what anchors their role in your financial life, i.e. they can either turn out to be a boon or bane.

Now, if you are a credit card user, one question that often comes up, is that how many credit cards should you have? How many are ¡®enough¡¯? Two, four or five? Well, lets find out.

How Many Credit Cards Should You Have?

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Well, there is no right or wrong answer here, as the number of credit cards you should have ideally depends on your need and usage.

The number of credit cards you can ideally hold depends on factors like your spending pattern and frequency of spends. Holding two or more credit cards certainly gives you a host of advantages like higher benefits on spending across multiple cards based on their reward point accumulation program, spreading out of expenses across the month as per interest free period of each card, serving as a backup if the primary card gets lost or stolen and last but not the least, and boosting your credit score when credit utilization ratio is maintained below 30% mark.

Also Read: Why Do Millennials Fall Into Credit Card Debt Trap?

What To Keep In Mind?

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The category of your spends is a key here. So, if you tend to spend a lot on a particular category like travel, shopping, grocery etc, you should have one credit card that offers higher benefits on that category of spending.

Or, if you tend to spend on multiple such categories, you can have multiple cards that cater to respective categories. This number can be two, three, five or more too.

Ultimately, it all depends upon on how you handle the credit cards' usage and repayment. You can be reckless with holding of even one credit card, whereas someone else may be using and repaying multiple credit cards responsibly too!

But one thing that you need to keep in mind here is that while holding multiple credit cards, take note of their annual/joining fee too. It should turn out to be too high for you to handle.

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