The ideal number of credit cards in my experience is none. As soon as you turn 18 and the bank offers you credit you take out a card. Offers then comein from other companies and naively you accept, the debts snowball and then you spend a good few years with credit cards you can’t use because they are up to their limits and a lot of what should be disposable income going out on repayments that never touch the balance.

Of course, if handled carefully, one credit card with a sensible interest rate can be very useful in times of need or when you don’t want to carry cash. The trick is to only use as much balance as you think you can pay off in full before you will need it again. For luxuries such as holidays, if you put all the money that would be going towards credit card repayments during a year into a savings account you would have a good portion of your fund there already, and no repayments afterwards. Most cards offer attractive honeymoon periods of 0% for a few months and after that if you are clever you can transfer your balance to another company offering the same. This means that your repayments are actually paying your balance off, rather than lining the bank’s pockets.

If there a large item that you really want or need, a personal loan might offer a much lower interest rate over a shorter time. The flipside is that they are often inflexible and have higher repayments, but shop around.

In summary, borrow only what you need and try to save for items that you can plan for in advance.