With a little planning, you can make credit cards work for you

THINGS come in threes: this article is the third in a trilogy inspired by TV. I'm going to start getting out more after this.

It was a MasterCard commercial. The opening shot showed a supermarket checkout, with groceries rolling along the little plastic mat towards the cashier. The voiceover said: "Frozen dinner, frozen dinner, frozen dinner, frozen dinner. $12." Then it added: "Breaking in your new flat-screen plasma TV. Priceless."

So far, so good. Then the MasterCard logo came up and the voiceover said something clever. Then the logo turned into a bag of groceries and the voice said something like: "MasterCard. It's for groceries."

No, it isn't.

I thought I was hallucinating the first time I saw the ad. There's a rule in money wisdom that says if you're buying your groceries on credit, you are headed for trouble. I would accept that the financial milieu in which we live has changed since that statement was absolute, but financial discipline is clear on this.

If you must borrow, use money you already have to buy food, and borrow the money to buy the thing you can't afford and so must borrow to buy.

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