them? This has been perpetuated by Dave Ramsey and so many people, especially young people with not much background in finance, believe they must get rid of their credit cards in order to be financially sound. I've heard it mentioned several times over the last week and it peeves me.

I remember sitting in one of my finance classes and my professor went over his basic personal finance rules to live by. The first one was to always accept free money. I laughed at first, but it's actually really good advice. One example he gave was to take full advantage of your employer's 401k matching program. It's essentially free money.

Credit cards are another perfect example. I do ALL of my purchasing with credit cards and I get between 1-5% cash back. During the holidays my Chase Freedom card actually offered 10% cash back at Amazon and other retailers. These bonuses really add up and you literally do nothing different except pay with your credit card instead of debit/cash. IT'S FREE MONEY. The obvious follow-up here is that you MUST pay off your credit card at LEAST monthly. If you pay any interest at all, it's a waste. Just as you pay your utility bills, rent/mortgage, etc, you should never even get close to being late on your credit card payment. Use mint.com to track all your expenses and budget. Using a credit card vs debit/cash should have no impact on your budgeting. You'll just end up with some extra $$ in your account from your cash back rewards.

There are many other ways to collect "free money", but I'll stop here to avoid an unreasonably long post. I also understand that this is obvious advice to many of you, but there are also a lot of people that could really use it.

tl;dr - use your credit cards for cash back rewards and pay off your credit card(s) monthly to avoid paying interest. Free money = winning.