Mark Cuban didn’t climb from a beat-up car with holes in the floorboard to billionaire status by swiping credit cards.
When he stopped by “The Dave Ramsey Show” in 2014, Cuban made it clear that plastic is the enemy of prosperity. In fact, he and Ramsey joke that people send them each other’s comments on debt because their views line up so closely. Both believe credit cards are financial quicksand — and Cuban didn’t sugarcoat his point.
“People ask me where’s the best place to invest,” Cuban told host Dave Ramsey. “The best place to invest is to pay off all your credit cards and burn them. If you’re paying 15% or 20% in interest, if you pay that down, you just earned 15% or 20%.” Then came the stinger: “If you use your credit cards, you don’t want to be rich.”
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That message cuts through the illusion that credit card perks and points are worth the trade-off. Carry a balance, and you’re essentially signing up to lose double-digit returns every year. Pay it off, and you’ve locked in the kind of guaranteed return Wall Street can’t promise. Cuban framed it as simple math, but it’s also a philosophy: wealth starts by making sure your money compounds for you, not against you.
Cuban’s background gives the advice extra weight. He wasn’t born rich. He hustled through odd jobs, lived lean, and built his fortune step by step. His disdain for credit card debt isn’t theory — it’s rooted in the kind of discipline that helped him break free from being broke.
Ramsey and Cuban don’t see eye to eye on everything — Cuban uses debt strategically in business while Ramsey avoids it altogether — but when it comes to credit cards, they’re united. Destroy them, cut them up, burn them. Because as Cuban argued, you can’t build wealth if you’re paying banks 20% interest every month.
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Even those with the best intentions to pay their balance in full can get caught. Life throws curveballs — a job loss, an unexpected medical bill, or even just a month of overspending — and suddenly the balance grows. What begins as a plan to “float” a purchase for a few weeks often turns into months of carrying debt. Interest piles on top of interest, and making only the minimum payment becomes a trap. Before long, the perks that once made credit cards feel worthwhile are completely erased by mounting charges that make it harder and harder to get out.
That golden advice was delivered 11 years ago, when Cuban warned about rates of 15% to 20%. Just like everything else, those numbers have climbed. Today, the average APR on accounts carrying a balance is about 22.25%. By comparison, the S&P 500 has delivered roughly 10% annual returns over decades, dividends included.
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Put $1,000 into an S&P 500 fund and, on average, you might see it grow to around $1,100 in a year. Carry that same $1,000 as credit card debt at 22% APR, and you’ll owe about $1,220 by year’s end. That’s not building wealth — that’s running in reverse.
Cuban’s point is that the math isn’t just unforgiving — it’s relentless. High-interest debt doesn’t wait for you to catch up. Once you’re on that treadmill, it speeds up faster than most people can run. Breaking free means refusing to step on in the first place.
For him, credit cards don’t just slow people down — they guarantee you’ll never get rich.
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Image: Imagn Images