It’s one of the most frequently asked questions in the credit industry. What is a good credit card balance? There’s two ways to look at this question, you can look at it from a credit standpoint, or you can look at it from a personal finance standpoint.

• Credit Perspective: At most you want to keep a 30% balance
• Personal Finance Perspective: Credit card balance should be at 0%

This can be very confusing for someone who wants to get the most of their credit. Financial advisers like Dave Ramsey tell us that all debt is bad, and that you should completely eliminate credit scores. However on the other side, gurus like Robert Kiyosaki tell us debt is good as long as you leverage it.

Here’s the truth; they’re both right. Most people have racked up credit card debt and maxed out their credit cards, thus paying 19% interest annually on those cards. Looking at it from a personal finance point of view, that person is doing something terribly. The funny thing is that learning personal finance will change your life forever. If you understood everything about money, you would not only pay down your credit card balance to 30%, but more than likely you’d pay down all credit card debt, and leave all credit cards with a zero balance.

So which is it? 30% or 0%?

We all must work in stages, someone who doesn’t know anything about personal finance, should at least know the basics of credit, which is to pay it down to 30%. What is important there, is not to overwhelm someone with too many things in the beginning.

It’s the same thing if you have a friend who is overweight and you ask them to participate in a triathlon. Your chances of success will be zero to none. Take that same person and ask them to walk around the block just one time a week, and you’ll have higher success. Once that person walks around one time a week, they might want to increase their activity and find other things to do, and right before you know it, they’ve changed and lost a ton of weight!

If you’re maxed out with credit cards, pay til 30%, when you get there, you’ll want to know what else you can do, and the next step is to learn personal finance. Banks were setup to let us fail, and it’s in our best interest to know everything about the financial markets to learn how to not be taken advantage of.

If you knew everything about finances, you’d have offers in the mail of banks just begging you to take their money, instead of the current situation you are in.