Debt Blog

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In the aftermath of subprime loans and insurance bailouts, preventative maintenance is now of utmost importance. Even the money management television shows that were already popular for the past few years are being looked at in a whole new light. One thing that a lot of money management experts have to contend with is people with out-of-control credit card debt. I myself can speak from experience of financial black hole credit card debt can cause. When I was 18 years old, I began getting applications for credit cards. At first, I ignored them, but as I got more and more, I was curious to see if it was just that easy to get a credit card. My very first one came within a month with a 0 limit. Another came later with 0. I didn’t know what to do with them—at that time of my life, bank check cards weren’t very popular yet, and I had obviously never used a credit card before. Eventually I made my way to an ATM machine and managed to successfully withdraw . I was very excited, but swore I would only take more in the event of an emergency. Unfortunately, my teenage mind soon forgot that promise, and I was using it for fast food, CD’s, movie theaters, and other entertainment frivolities.About halfway through my first semester in college, I had exhausted both balances, plus an additional 0 balance of a third credit card I acquired just before college started. The bills came, I couldn’t pay them, they came again with late fees, I ignored them, etc. By the time I finished out my first semester in college, the credit card companies were calling me at my dorm. When they found only dead ends with me, they began sending collection letters to my college address and my home address, where my dad found them and confronted me about my problem. After the humiliation of having to admit that I was in trouble, he offered to help me pay them, and told me that it happened to my older sister, as well as him and my mom when they were younger, which made me feel better. I didn’t learn from this experience. It was five years later, when I had acquired more credit cards, both major card companies and department store cards, that I realized I had a much bigger problem. The total of my balances came to over 000. I had contacted debt management companies, but kept feeling like they were just trying to sell me something, so I decided to do things the hard way and just pay everything off when and however I could. I put a little money aside here and there, I used tax return money, I even participated in paying medical studies (well-observed and safe). My aim was to not simply make minimum payments—I wanted to pay everything I could possibly owe, then start over with a clean slate and filter out any unnecessary accounts. It took me another three years, but I eventually managed to pay everything off whittle my credit card debt down to one card with a reasonable balance. I have now been debt-manageable for a little over two years, and no longer feel all the stress I used to feel when I get bills in the mail, or when my phone rings.

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