Voyager and other lifetime debtors, the money’s out there for you to borrow, and you’re welcome to it. I say “Leverage, Schmeverage”, but that’s just me. Peace. 
Cool. I’ll sell some equities on which I am making an 8% rate of return to pay off a mortgage on which I am paying 4% interest, considering taxes. Sounds like a good strategy.
I’m very debut adverse. I would never borrow money to buy a car, since that is not an investment. You are welcome to be debt-phobic, but it is not necessarily good advice for others. BTW, you are the first person who ever said I have too much debut - when I talk to financial planners, they almost fall into a swoon at seeing someone with no debt except a mortgage. BTW, I have way over 50% equity in my admittedly overpriced house. I’m in no danger of going to debtor’s prison anytime soon.
I got a credit card at the age of 18 (I think). I’m now 21 and have never carried the balance over a month.
It’s pretty simple. I don’t spend what I don’t have. I use the credit card for convenience: I only get ten free transactions per month with my debit card, while I can pay my credit card off with just one; I can buy stuff online this way; I get an interest-free loan for a month. The credit history I’m generating isn’t a bad thing, either.
Credit cards can be used responsibly.
I myself have a Visa, but as long as there’s no annual fee and you plan to pay it off every month, I don’t think the card brand matters very much.
I don’t have the energy right now to run all of the numbers, cuauhtemoc, so I can’t give you an exact cut off point.
I probably would have been able to tolerate it for another year, maybe two, but we had already been in that apartment for four years. It was a pretty decent apartment, really, but we were tired of neighbors smoking in the hallways, views of the parking lot, and our kitchen cabinets slowly disintegrating. We had received a copy of the new lease for the upcoming year, and it would have increased our rent almost $100 per month. Moving to a new apartment would have been expensive (first and last month’s rent and security) and difficult (finding an apartment of comperable size and rent, that also took pets).
We ran through everything, and realized that we could buy a home for only a few hundred dollars a month more then the increased rent. Our budget could handle the increase, especially with the desperately needed tax advantages. (A married couple making > $100,000 a year, with no children and no other deductions other than the standard, pays a LOT of income tax.) The primary sticking point was that we thought we could use that additional monthly money to pay off most of our credit card bills if we stuck it out one more year.
It simply didn’t seem to make sense to us to keep paying all of that money into an apartment when we could be building equity in a house. We talked over the extra amount that we would be paying over the years, between another year of credit card interest and the additional mortgage interest from our having almost no downpayment. But we decided that in the long run, the advantages of owning a home were worth it.
I’m 27 (my husband’s 28). If I thought that the increased debt would make the difference between a safe retirement or not, then we might have made a different decision. However, I think that owning a home (and we should own it outright decades before retirement age) will probably do as much for our security as our 401Ks will.
My parents (divorced and both remarried) live on roughly a quarter of what we make. Neither have any substantial savings. Both have become permanently disabled in the last five years, and live primarily on Social Security. Both will almost certainly never own a home. I’ve seen them live in a succession of cheap apartments and row homes my entire life, and throw away many thousands of dollars in rent in the process. If they had been paying that money into a house or trailer, then they’d have something to fall back on. It has convinced me, more than any numbers about property value increases, that home ownership is a vital part of long-term financial stability.
Oh, and cuauhtemoc, I want you to know that I really respect your anti-debt stance. I can completely understand wanting to avoid wasting all of that money. But I weighed the pros and cons, and it the pros worked for me. Credit can be a powerful tool if you use it correctly. For me, it’s not about how much I can save, it’s about how I can live (short term and long term) with the money I make. YMMV.