"​I think people get confused with this idea, because it's not necessarily a bad thing to carry a balance on a credit card," says Shannon McLay, the president and founder of The Financial Gym . "If you pay your current balance off on time every month, you will avoid the true pain of carrying credit card balances. [But] if your balance carries over to the next month and continues to do so, your card balances become true headaches, because this is where credit card companies start to make money on you."