“Credit cards versus store cards – what’s the best and worst for your wealth?”

Best and worst? Nuh-huh. Worst and worster! Just take my Grandma. She’s used her credit cards to obliterate her home equity and her Boomer kids’ inheritances. (“Bad Grandma! Very naughty!”)

Via a nasty RSL club cocktail of pokies and cheap feeds, her good times Golden Girl party team and an ever flowing tap of Visa and Mastercard (plus another I know exists, but she’s hiding really well from me), Grandma has blown the lot.

Credit cards or store cards aren’t a choice between good and evil. In the hands of the weak-willed, they’re both financial death sentences.

Here’s an easier question. If you’re really hungry and the only two things on offer are razor blades or broken glass, which should you dine on?

Grimace. Broken glass for me. Don’t ask why.

If you don’t use either credit or store cards properly, they are both giant wealth suckers. A six-foot mosquito that drains every last drop of blood out of you. Shrivelled up like The Simpsons’ Mr Burns.

The only way to win with credit or store cards is to use them for points, or discounts, and pay them off completely every month.

Most rewards programs are worth, perhaps, 0.5 to 1 per cent of the value of your spend. That is, spend $10,000 for about $100 worth of points. A store card might give good discounts, but will charge an even more ridiculous interest rate.

If you end up paying even the tiniest bit of interest with either card, you’d have been better off buying the points yourself.

Bruce Brammall is the author of Debt Man Walking (www.debtman.com.au) and a licensed financial adviser.