BY LEAH KARLINS, Read This! writer 

Want to be financially successful?  Check out what the experts say on ...

What to watch out for when getting a credit card

“Be really aware of the teaser rates.  Sometimes you will get a credit card offer, or they’ll say, “Oh, for a student we offer you 6 percent.”  But in the fine print, all you have to do is miss one payment or be late one time, and they’ll jack that up to 25 percent interest.”

 --Angela Hughes, director of business development for the Santa Clara County Federal Credit Union

“If you get a new credit card, most people are honest and diligent and don’t intend to abuse that credit card.  But what happens is, you don’t really realize that you owe the amount you charge plus the interest rate.  Then if you’re only making the minimum payment, you don’t realize how little of that payment really goes to reducing the balance, and so you do that for a number of months, and before you know it you’ve got a large balance and payments that you’re struggling to afford.”

-- Laura Levine, executive director of the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.  

 On why credit card companies market so aggressively to college students

“If you don’t pay the bill in full every month, they don’t care. They’d just as soon you made the minimum payment every month.  So that’s why they do it.  Because they’re not risking all that much, and it’s a reasonable risk for them to take in order to get you as a lifelong customer and to make money on you when you pay back the interest charges.”

-- Janet Bodnar, author of “Raising Money Smart Kids”
    
“You’re offered this free card, this free T-shirt, and what happens, what I see over and over, is these kids that have five, six, seven, eight credit cards at 22, 20 years old -- and it’s just not good for your credit.”

-- Philip X. Tirone, author of “7 Steps to a 720 Credit Score”

On managing money responsibly

“My recommendation for all teens is that you should have a savings account.  I think that one of the underlying problems in our society today is that we’re encouraged to spend money through advertising, peer pressure, any number of things.  Because we live in a very commercial society, we’re encouraged to spend, spend, spend, and we need to learn to set some of that aside.”

-- Levine

“There’s no reason to rush into [a credit card] when you’re 15 or 16, and I would really recommend against it.  At that age, you have all you can do to get your government paper in on time.  You don’t want to worry about paying the darn credit card bill.”

–- Bodnar

Leah Karlins is a senior at Branham High in San Jose.