Studies show that people spend more with credit than cash, and I assume that means even responsible people.
That always has struck me as odd. I rarely whip out the CC or debit card for anything except stuff I need (groceries, gas, home improvement project stuff), but once cash hits my wallet it flows out like water, usually on stupid incidental purchases.
+1 for me. If they took a closer look at this behavior between generations, I wonder if they would see a discrepancy. I became an adult in the age of CCs being common, things like Mint, YNAB being popular etc... and I find that cash is easier to 'lose.'
I find this also. If there is cash in my wallet, I tend to spend it. With a credit card, I'm definitely more thoughtful.
I grew up with the idea that a CC balance was to be paid in full, every month. My first CC was a joint with my dad and I remember him telling me as we were filling out the paperwork at the credit union "if you miss a payment on this, you will be messing up MY credit as well as your own, SO DON'T MISS A PAYMENT." I got into the habit of not missing payments and I guess never really regarded credit cards as free money or a loan (which I think are the viewpoints that get some people in trouble), just a different version of cash (that is, you have to have the money on hand to spend it).
I had a surprise moment in grad school when another student in my program said she would be amazed to learn than any of the grad students in our department did NOT carry credit card debt. I wasn't quite sure what to say to that as not only did I not have credit card debt, I had also paid off my student loans from undergrad the previous year, was on track to max out my IRA contributions for the year (and had been doing so for a couple years at that point), and had never really felt that CC debt was something I was in any danger of incurring. Sure, my savings rate was not super high and I had to live pretty frugally, but I had all the basic necessities of life and could think of a few areas where I could trim expenses further if I really needed to. I had sort of assumed most of us were in a similar boat but her comment got me thinking that maybe that was not the case. I will say after she said that I sort of started scrutinizing the lifestyles of students that were always complaining about being broke/not having enough money and sure enough, they tended to travel more, go out for dinner/drinks more, and live in slightly fancier apartments. So I guess that's where their potential CC debt was coming from.
Another (frugal) friend and I once tried to help a mutual friend who was having funding problems figure out a budget. It was atrocious. First, he hadn't been in the habit of tracking expenses much. We finally got some numbers written out for current expenses and the other frugal friend and I were making sensible (to us) suggestions like "gee, you are spending $600 a month on groceries, perhaps you should cut back on steak a little, or at least only buy it on sale?", or "hey, you know we can ride the bus for free, right? How about doing that instead of driving to campus every day, then you can stop paying for parking and save yourself gas money?". Every suggestion we made, he had some reason why that was not going to work or why he did not want to live like a "poor person". Of course, of the three of us, he WAS the poor person, as he was something like $50k in debt while the other frugal friend and I both had a positive net worth. And hello, we were in grad school, one of the few times in your life when it is 100% socially acceptable to be poor! I haven't kept up with him a whole lot since we finished school, but from what I have heard he is basically still on the same track...he has at least moved to a lower COL area so perhaps that has slowed the unsustainability somewhat.