Europeans, what is something that Americans have/do that makes no sense to you?

Like A Duck@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 236 points –
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Cars. You seem to buy cars like smartphones( actualy probably even worse since buying phone on credit dosent seem to be as common nowadays ) . If you can afford the credit payment for the card dosent mean you can afford the car. In fact why everyone buys stuff on credit cards in the US . It seems insane to me to go to debt for a stupid cofee.

The idea behind using a credit card is to earn credit for when you actually need to borrow money. You should be using credit cards as proof you can pay back what you spend so you should have that money. An ideal use case is having the money on a debit card, opting to use a credit card and paying it off before it incurs a cost. Doing this would be free for you but could help greatly in the long term when you borrow for something like a mortgage.

But you shouldn't do this if you are already bad with money. I just use mine to pay for online subscriptions and have them automatically paid off because I know I can't be trusted to remember to pay them off

I (european) pay everything with a credit card (where possible, which is every store except some small independent ones). Then, I pay everything back by the due date. Why? In addition to a free loan while my assets are invested, I get 1-2% cashback. Yay, free money.

What we have of credit scores doesn't depend on our credit history as in the US though. Unless you currently have unpaid debt there should be nothing negative in your credit report. As it should be.

At least in Poland credit cards dont seem to have the cashback option,which makes them even more pointless compared to debit cards.

You're misunderstanding how credit cards are very often used.

Just because you pay with a credit card doesn't mean you are 'going into debt'. I pay my credit card off every month. I never accrue interest. But it's 1. Beneficial to my credit score to use it some and 2. I get cash back on some types of items, so it's just beneficial to use my card.

You do get into debt. Its just intrest free for a reminder of a month . And credit score honestly looks like chinese social score to me. 2. Now this point is actually a reasonable one. Alghtough I dont think there is something similar in poland for credit cards ( probably beacuse credit cards are treated as the devil itself, rightfully in my opinion , so not a lot of pepole have them )alghtough it seems to not be the case in whole of europe judging from at least one comment .

Despite the technicality, nobody refers to using a credit card and immediately paying it off as 'going into debt' and if you use it that way people aren't going to understand what you're meaning.

The credit system is screwy, but if you can't see the difference between social score and a financial score, that's on you.

Credit ratings are done internationally between countries, and most countries have some sort of internal credit scoring system. It's hardly US specific, aside from our specific implementation.