WHAT'S IN YOUR WALLET?

I got my first charge card back in the seventies.  Back then, you didn't have bank cards, just company cards - like gas station cards, or sears cards, or some other business.  When bank cards started getting populat in the nineties, I got one, and that's when my spending woes began.  Cards allow you to overspend what you can afford to pay at the end of each month, and so you end up carrying a balance . . . and sometimes it's a big balance.  I kept my card balances in check until I retired, and that's when they went up . . . and up . . . and up.  By 2007, I owed four different card companies more than $30,000.  And that's when I ran them through a shredder and started paying them off.  For the next three years, I paid about $1,500 a month on the cards, and I got out of card debt.  For the past few years, I've been doing without them, and it's been easy to do.

Card companies and merchants (almost anyone with something to sell) want to convince you that life without a credit card is impossible.  And there are some inconveniences to not having one.  When I buy gas for my cars now, I must walk inside and pay cash for it.  No big deal.  I had to give up trading on Ebay because they require a card, and that's fine because it kept me from buying things I didn't really need.  I can't rent a car at an airport, and I can't make lodging reservations without a card . . . but again, I don't care.  If I'm lucky, I'll never have to get on an airplane again.  I don't plan on renting a car either, and I sure as hell don't plan on being pressured into getting another credit card.

If you've got crippling credit card debt, my advice is to do exactly what I did.  You can live without them, and the inconveniences aren't all that hard to deal with.  If you can't totally get away from having a credit card, reduce the number to just one . . . and then do your best to keep the balance low.  What keeps me away from cards these days is remembering how difficult it was to pay them off, and I love the freedom of not being in debt to a bank.  Statistics show that the average American family caries a card debt of about ten grand.  In most cases, that's not an outrageous amount.  But then you have people like me, the abuser, the dumbass.  I'm sure glad that's behind me.