Saturday, January 31, 2009

Ditch the Credit Cards

By William Blake

Today credit cards are all the rage. Everyone has one. No one pays cash for anything anymore. Some people don't even carry cash. Charging is the way to go. And the result? A lot of people drowning in credit card debt. The solution? Try using cash for a change.

Did you know that some credit cards carry an interest rate as high as twenty-nine percent? You wouldn't want an interest rate that large on your home or car, so why settle for it on your credit cards? For those credit card companies that offer a super low interest rate at the beginning, if you miss one payment, the interest rate jumps up to around a whopping eighteen percent or more. Read the fine print.

Credit cards are a way of establishing credit. Purchasing items and making payments on time lets potential credit lenders know that you are an acceptable risk for them. Good credit helps people to qualify for low interest loans on houses, cars, and furniture.

However, compounding interest makes credit card use a dangerous game. You need to be careful because before you know you it can rack up huge debts on multiple credit cards and they will just keep mounding month to month. It becomes a vicious cycle.

It may seem easy to buy everything on credit. But if you are buying things that will no longer have when it comes time to pay for the purchase what sense does that make. How ridiculous if you charged a meal on your credit card three months ago and you are still paying on it, plus interest. That food has been long gone and you are still in debt because of it.

An emergency card is good to have. It is very useful when the unexpected happens and there is no disposable cash to take care of it. So it is not necessary to ban all credit card use.

So pick the one with the lowest interest rate, pay the others off and cut them up. Close your accounts and don't let the credit card companies talk you out of it. They are the only ones that stand to gain from you having multiple credit cards and mountains of credit card debt.

Before there was plastic, people used to pay with cash. Remember cash? If people didn't have enough money, they waited until they did. We all could take a page from their book. People are too comfortable carrying around a boatload of debt.

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