Your Secret Weapon Against Credit Card Debt

The television advertisements and dozens of junk mail advertisements you get all make big promises. They are real good at selling the idea that they can get you out of credit card debt with some phenomenal program or secret weapon that you can find only by coming to them. When you think about it, these people are pretty despicable. They are seeking to make money by preying on people who already are deep in debt. The want to victimize the victims and in many societies, they put people in jail for that.



Anyway, you and I both know that most of those slick marketing productions that pitch getting you out of credit card debt through some sophisticated and costly program are a bunch of hot air. But there is a secret weapon right under your nose that if you can set off its amazing power, it can get you out of credit card debt and keep you there.



This secret weapon is pretty amazing and you know we aren’t trying to market anything to you because this secret weapon doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t require you send off for anything and you can find it right in your own home and put it to work immediately at no cost to you. But it is also a secret weapon that is not “sexy” and it will not make you go “OOO” and “AHH” by impressing you with its slick design.



The secret weapon is a budget. See, we told you it wasn’t a sexy solution. But when you analyze why you have the credit card debt in the first place, putting a rock solid budget in place is the foundation of a long term solution to your problem. The marketers can give you all kinds of fancy analysis and discussion on the cause of credit card debt in your life that will put the blame on everything from the foreign exchange rate to immigration to global warming. But it doesn’t do you a bit of good to point fingers about the problem. The only thing that will do you good is to give you the tools and weapons to fix it.



There is just no getting around it, you are in trouble with your credit because you are living above your means. In other words, you are spending more than you make. This isn’t to throw a lot of blame and guilt around. There are a lot of situations that can cause you to live above your means. You could lose your job or have an emergency in the family that can cause you financial worries. But when the money going out is the more money than is coming in, you have a problem that will drive up your credit card debt.



To write a budget, you simply sit down and take inventory of those two factors. You inventory how much money you have coming in. Then you inventory how much money you have to pay out. This step alone is a huge step forward toward getting your debt problem under control. A computer spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel is excellent for this kind of family budget planning and analysis because you can move things around and let the computer do the math for you.



Don’t make excuses about this. If you don’t know how much a certain kind of spending costs you, dig out your receipts for the last few months and get a feel for it. But once you know your income and your bills, you can tell if there is a gap. Then you can make plans to close that gap either by getting more income or by cutting out some bills or both.



It won’t be easy and it won’t be fun. But if you get on a budget and stay there, you have the basic foundation for a solid family financial plan and you can move forward from there. You may go on to use some other tools to bring your credit card debt under control such as credit card consolidation or balance transfers. But don’t do a thing before you find that secret weapon and make it start working for you. And that secret weapon is a realizing and reliable family budget.

Working With Your Credit Score

When you see advertisement after advertisement on television of businesses who want you to find out your “free” credit score, that is a red flag that someone is looking to make some money off of you. The funny thing is they are not lying to you but at the same time, you are exactly right that those companies paying good money for television advertising are looking to make a buck off of you.



The truth is, you can actually find out what your credit report says about you. What they are telling you about that is true. Your credit report tells you your credit score which helps you understand how creditors see you which is important if you go to get a new loan. But your credit report also shows a detailed history of your past use of credit, currently open accounts and anyone who has checked your credit score in the last year.



This is important information for you because anyone can check your credit report anytime they want to. And if there are too many inquiries on your credit report, that itself can drive down your score. So if you find someone is checking your score too often, you can take action to put a stop to it.



But there are a couple things they are not telling you on those advertisements. One is that if you use their services, they will give you the credit report for free but not the credit score. They are going to have their hand out for that little tidbit of information. But the truth that those companies will not tell you is that you can get that score at least once a year absolutely free if you know how. In other words, those people hitting you up on television to check your credit score are relying on the fact that (1) you don’t know how to check it yourself and (2) you are willing to give them money for something you can get for free if you know how.



The basic information you should know about credit reports is that there are three agencies that maintain credit reporting and they are named Equifax, Experian and Transunion. You can check on what each of these companies has in their file at any given time. In addition to a lot of detail about your credit history as we just discussed, your credit “health” will be represented in the form of a number of a “score”. That score will run between 300 and 850. The higher your credit score, the better you will be received by credit organizations who are deciding whether to extend you a loan.



Once you have this information, you can take action to improve how you stand on your credit history. First of all, review the credit detail in depth. You may find accounts still open that you have not used for years. Close those accounts. If you have a credit account that is not being used, it is of not value to you, it only runs down your credit score and there is always a danger someone will use it.



But the next step is to start being “credit smart” in how you use credit to help see that credit score go up over the next year. The steps to do that are….



§ Always pay your bills on time. Late payments are reported to the credit bureaus and it runs your score down.

§ Make more than the minimum payments. If you only pay the minimum on each credit card you owe, that will get noticed by the credit tracking software and make your credit score go down.

§ Cut down on the amount of times your credit score is checked. Excessive inquiries into your score indicate that you are looking at getting more credit and that hurts your score.

§ Close unneeded credit accounts.

§ Start closing some of your credit card accounts once you pay them off.

§ Don’t take out any new accounts.



Don’t let yourself get excited by the virtual nonstop advertising about your credit history. You do not need to know this information every day. But check it a couple times a year, no sooner than once every three months to keep tabs on what is going on with your credit history. It’s the responsible thing to do and you can just change the channel on those noisy commercials too.

Time to Get Good and Angry About That Credit Card Debt

There is something strange about what happens to all of us psychologically when we see our credit card debt just keep climbing and climbing with no end in sight. For some reason, our emotional reaction is often one of ambivalence or even acceptance as though having a mountain of debt to credit card companies is a part of life and no big deal.



But it is a big deal. When a huge portion of your monthly budget goes to servicing debt, it’s a big deal because that money could be going toward a better house, a new car or even just for something fun for you or your family. Whatever it might buy is a lot better than it just being thrown away as interest on a ridiculously high credit mountain.



So as much as we all do strive for peace and keeping a positive attitude about life, in order to get some motivation to get out there and defeat this monster we call credit card debt, it might be time to get good and angry about the way credit cards handle our accounts and find the guts to finally find a way to just up and fire them.



In the retail world, it is a crime to use false advertising or pull off hat is called “bait and switch”. Bait and switch is a tactic where they advertise a price for a retail item and then when you get to the store, the price is wrong on the shelf or for some other reason (like, we ran out of the ones at the sale price), they bilk you into paying the non-sale price. That’s cheating and it’s wrong.



Credit card companies are the international grand champions of bait and switch. When they send you those glossy, well worded invitations to low interest, “no cost” credit cards, they have no intention of honoring that offer. Oh sure, they might set up the accounts that way. But if you read the fine print of what you are signing when you apply for the credit card, they retain the right to change the rules of how your credit bill is handled without notice and without restrictions. That means that even if they said there will be no annual fee, they can impose one and there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it.



Even more outrageous is the fact that credit card companies can and often do raise the cost of what you are paying for the goods or services you bought using your credit card, again without any notice at all. So if you bought a refrigerator on your credit card which at the time was charging 8% interest, the credit card company can up and raise your interest level to 20% overnight, with no reason for doing so and with no notice to you. So what just happened is they jacked up the price of the refrigerator you bought and you have to pay it. If that doesn’t get you good and mad, well, it should.



If you watch how the credit card companies handle your accounts, you can tell they are looking for any excuse to raise your rates. If your payment comes in an hour late, they can double your rates. And guess what? They are the ones who determine if your payment came in late. So if you mail it a week and a half a head of time, they can still claim it as late and jack up your interest rate and impose a huge penalty for late payment.



It’s just amazing and completely outrageous that credit card companies are able to change the rules of how you do business with them with no respect for you as a customer and with no intervention by any federal agency. In fact, the concept that the federal government is in the pockets of the credit card companies is reinforced over and over again.



Getting good and mad about credit card debt can mobilize you to do some things that are long overdue. It might be overdue for you to contact your congressman and start putting them on notice that we aren’t going to take this anymore. But it is definitely overdue for you to see the credit card companies for what they are and fire them by getting rid of that credit card debt once and for all.

The Jail Cell of Credit Card Debt

There is a thing as what the experts call “the problem solving process”. This is a systematic method for solving problems that you always use to go from the starting point where the problem is to the ending point where the problem is resolved. There are six basic steps to the problem solving process and none of them can be skipped. They are…



1. Recognize the problem

2. Define the problem

3. Propose solutions

4. Identify risks and costs

5. Select the best solution

6. Implement the solution.



This process always works because there is no room for emotions, excuses or procrastination. You step from the first phase to the last in prompt fashion and the problem becomes solved.



Many times when it comes to credit card debt, people don’t like to recognize the problem. In 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is always to just recognize that you have a problem. And this is very often the biggest obstacle for someone who is seeing their credit card debt begin to take over their lives.



The credit card companies are no help. They like nothing more than to do all they can to make you incur more and more debt. It isn’t necessarily that they are evil but this is how they make a living. The money from the interest you pay on your credit card debt goes to pay for the houses, meals, college educations and fancy cars of many credit card company executives. That alone should make you want to pull the plug on this grand scam called credit card debt.



Let’s call a spade a spade. Credit card debt is a loan that you don’t have to fill out any more paperwork than just to get the card. Once you have it, the credit card companies are thrilled to jack up your credit limit to where you can buy more and more and more all the while your interest rate creeps up too. Before long the debt level is huge and you are sending them hundreds of dollars and a big part of that payment is the interest.



Interest is money that doesn’t buy anything. It is money the credit card company gets for doing nothing more than housing your debt. If we could get perspective on credit card debt, we would see that there is no rational explanation why one credit card can charge 5% interest and another one charge 25% interest. The credit card companies owe us no explanation of what that money goes for.



It’s not like when you buy a loaf of bread that may cost one dollar for one kind of bread but three dollars for another kind of bread. In those cases you can easily see that the higher priced bread is of higher quality, tastes better or is more nutritious than the cheap bread. You literally get more for your money. When a credit card company charges you a higher rate of interest, there is no increased value for what they give you. They don’t give you anything. If a credit card company raises your interest rate from 10% to 20%, you don’t get twice as much good service or any kind of product for that extra money that are taking out of your product.



Then how can they get away with it? They do it because they can get away with it and there’s no indication that any governmental body is going to make them stop. They get away with it because we don’t get outraged and drop them when they cheat us like that. And they get away with it because credit card debt is a jail cell and we can’t get out.



The purpose of this discussion is to get us to step one of the problem solving process. It is to make us aware that we are being had and to make you good and outraged. If you are outraged that you have a problem, then you can move on to step two and there and four and look for a solution and then do whatever it takes to make that solution happen. And when you do that, you are well on your way to springing open the door of the jail cell of credit card debt and walking away a free man or woman, hopefully never to go into that jail again.

The Basics of Credit Card Debt Consolidation

Credit card debt consolidation is a term that gets thrown around on television quite a lot. You see so much advertising for this service that you have to know that someone is making a lot of money off of people like you and me that have serious credit card debt problems. But once you understand what credit card consolidation is and how it is accomplished, it is very likely you can accomplish the same goals and get the same benefits without paying anyone an excessive fee.



The reasons these services have sprung into existence is that with the economy being so difficult and with gas prices and prices for so many of life’s necessities going higher and higher, many people are spreading their debt over many credit cards. The result is an average family might have three or four or even more credit cards with high debt run up on them and the interest fees being charged can get quite high.



Despite the customer friendly language credit cards use when they try to lure you into running up your debt even higher, these credit cards are making credit card companies a lot of money and they want you to pay them down slowly so they can continue to charge big fees month to month. So the first of credit card consolidation is to get all of that debt into one account, get rid of the credit card debt and perhaps close those accounts entirely and get a reasonable interest rate you can deal with over time.



So the first core principle or “basic” of credit card consolidation is getting rid of multiple creditors and getting all of your debt into one account or at least fewer credit accounts. At the same time its preferable to work with a creditor who is willing to work with you with the goal of reducing debt so the interest rate can be set at a level significantly lower than what you were paying to the credit cards so more of what you pay goes to pay down the debt and less to interest and fees.



One tactic that is often used to move your debt to lower rate interest loans is to use zero percent short term offers from credit card companies. Now watch those because sometimes there are transfer fees that are as high as an interest payment. But if you can move several thousand dollars to a zero percent loan for six months, you can then work on paying off higher interest credit cards while that part of your debt is not running up the balances. But watch out because at the end of the zero percent period, sometimes the interest rate on that loan will shoot up higher than any of your other loans.



The important things that you take charge of your credit and not let it be in charge of you. Start a log or a spreadsheet where you document each credit card you have, what the interest rate is, the expiration date on short term low rates, what you credit limits are and what your payments are. This kind of consolidation of your records will tell you which credit cards need the most attention and where you should look to consolidate two credit cards into one or all of them into the one credit source that you feel you can work with long term. Then you have a partner to help you make a plan to get out of credit card debt and stay that way.

Teaching the Kids About Credit

One of the ways some of us get into credit card debt trouble comes out of nothing more than lack of awareness of how credit cards can sneak up on us. The first time you maxed out a card and faced the overwhelming task of paying down a credit card and getting yourself back on firm financial footing, it can be a sobering experience. And if you have gone through this experience, the school of hard knocks taught you well that it’s easier to prevent credit card debt than to recover from it.



Maybe the best thing about getting hard won knowledge is that you can pass it along to your kids. So how can you go about helping your children establish a good relationship with credit and learn how to use it responsibly so they don’t have to learn about credit card debt and credit card abuse the hard way? Just like everything else in life, they depend on you to teach them how to function as adults. So we should take this responsibility seriously.



First of all, teaching kids to use credit effectively is not about keeping them from having credit. If anything, the opposite is true. A credit card is as essential a tool for modern living as a car and a cell phone. We would even make the bold statement that to send a child out to fend for himself or for herself without a working credit card in her pocket, a respectable credit rating already building up and the training in how to use credit is nothing less than irresponsible parenting by adults. It is equivalent of sending your child into a battle with no weapons. Credit is essential and smart use of credit is even more essential.



You can help your kids begin to understand the basics of getting good credit by getting them a credit card in high school or college. You can pay the bills but this is a good way for them to pay for what they need and you can keep track of their spending from that monthly bill you get. But make sure that credit card is in your child’s name so as you pay it off each month, they build up the good credit rating from what you are doing. Consider it another one of the many legacies you are passing along to your kids.



But don’t just let your kids go hog wild with their credit card. In fact, you can work with a credit card company to establish a credit limit and not allow it to go up. In that way, you can set a limit on the amount of credit they have each month. And if they go over it and suddenly cannot buy lunch because they abused their credit, that afternoon of going hungry will teach them more than two days of lecture about fiscal responsibility can do.



Make sure your kids are aware that you paying their bills is a privilege and that they are very lucky to be able to start their adult lives with a sponsor like this. Then give them three jobs they must complete to show they are worthy of this privilege. (!) They must save all receipts of every purchase they make. If they buy something and don’t get a receipt, they must make one. (2) They must maintain a ledger of spending. This is similar to a check book ledger but it must be complete with every purchase they made and a running total and it must be maintained daily. If an expenditure shows up that is not on that ledger, they will be required to pay that back to you or risk losing their credit card. (3) They must sit you once a week to review the credit card bill and explain item by item what each entry on there is. This will do a lot to keep them from using the credit card frivolously.



These simple habits if done over a period of months will teach your children how to track, monitor and be aware of their spending and their use of credit. In that way, when you cut the apron strings entirely, they will not only have the credit they need to have a good adult life, they will be wise in how they use it. And there is no better gift you can give to a child than that.

Taking on Credit Card Debt

Credit card debt is the kind of thing that can go from a convenience to a cruel taskmaster in a short time. Very often the reason you may have a credit card debt problem may not be anything bad about you. It only takes a few bad breaks to drive your debt level dangerously high. Some unemployment, a few high medical or home repair bills or other unexpected expenses and before you know it, you have a big problem.



There are a lot of advertisements for credit card debt consolidation. The first word of caution we all should have about using these services is be careful. A good rule of thumb is that if they have money to advertise on television, they are going to make money off of you in some way shape or form. If you have bad credit and few resources to tap to get that problem under control, the interest rate on the debt consolation could be just as much of a prison as the debt itself. But there are good services out there too so just shop wisely.



So it’s a good idea to have a strategy for taking no credit card debt and starting to turn the corner on dealing with the problem. And part of that strategy is using the resources you have. The biggest asset you may own is your home. Now, most of us are hesitant to use our homes as collateral to get our credit levels down. But if you have a fair amount of equity in your house, it can be a tool to get a second mortgage that has a favorable interest rate that is capped so it doesn’t float up and down at the whim of the lender.



A good place to start finding a good home equity loan is the lender who is handling the loan now. If the company that handles your finances now is doing a good job and doing business with you openly and fairly, you can get to them to negotiate a loan that both gives them some interest to make the loan worthwhile to them but gets your debt level under control. So if you can put all of your debt under a 30 year home equity loan at an interest rate sometimes 5-10% lower than credit cards, that frees up your budget to handle your expenses and start to see daylight on getting out of debt.



Another option for getting your credit cards under control is a credit management service. These agencies will take all of your outstanding credit card bills and work with the lenders to come up with a payment plan so they know they will get paid but the amount you have to put out is manageable by you. Again, these services will have fees but if they can at least put a fence around your rapidly expanding credit card debt situation, it might be a fee worth paying.



The important thing about you taking the first step of seeking help with your credit card debt is that you are taking charge of the situation. Too often, we feel hopeless and develop a victim mentality when we see those debts just keep going up knowing full well that at some point the monthly payments will overwhelm us. Reaching out to skilled and qualified services that can give you back some feeling of control over your debt can be liberating to you and give you hope that there may come a time when the trap of credit card debt still holds you captive. And that will be a wonderful feeling of freedom when you finally get free and are able to live within your means again.

Taking Credit Card Debt Down the Way You Ran it Up.

Sometimes we don’t take the time to get a real world understanding of not only what credit card debt is but how we got into this mess and what its going to take to get out of it. The first steps of solving the problem are the most important because by identifying what the problem is, you also identify what it isn’t. So if we can think logically about the problem of being buried in credit card debt, the path to digging out will become more clear.



It doesn’t take a committee to figure out the heart of how all this debt got started because it boils down to a very basic statement of economic fact. And that is that you got in debt because you spent more than you made. In other words, you are living at a standard of living higher than your income can support. And the overflow goes to debt.



It is pretty brutal when it gets to that level of honesty but when you look at it that way, then the solution begins to become clear to you. Now it’s important when doing this kind of analysis that no guilt is allowed. There are a lot of perfectly acceptable reasons you may have fallen into the debt. It’s not like you are necessarily running around spending lavishly on expensive cars and trips overseas.



Lots of things happen to a family budget that you have no control over and using your credit to handle it is the responsible thing to do. You may have lost your job or source of income. There may have been a family medical crisis that you just had to handle with credit funding. There are home repair emergencies, weather emergencies or trips you have to take to keep everything together. So for whatever reason as that credit hill turns into a credit mountain, then it becomes the family emergency to tackle.



The solution is evident from our diagnosis. It quite simply is not only to get to where you live within your means but to generate sufficient income to start paying that credit card debt mountain down the same way you drove it up, a little at a time. There are a lot of very adult things you can do and should do to make this dream a reality. You have to stop the debt from going up so to cancel as many credit cards as possible reduces the chance they will continue to accumulate charges.



Getting control over spending is going to take some family discipline. But if the whole family knows it’s also a family quest to get this debt off your backs, everybody can pitch in. You can eat at home and never out. You can scale back extras like cable TV or entertainment buying. You can let the holidays be about love and not gifts for a few years.



This also might be the time to think about adding some additional income to the family budget to get that overflow that you can use to attack the credit mountain more aggressively. One adult might take a second job and everyone agrees that every cent of that job will go against that debt. Keep good records and when the family sees that the debt is coming down, celebrate, albeit do so cheaply.



This is a hard step especially for the parent who has to work two jobs or if you have to send mom back to work for a little while to get this situation under control. Sometimes it can be made less harsh if the second job is something the adult going out likes to do like work a book store or a garden center which may be a hobby. Or if the job is on the internet, that parent could work in the comfort of home and make that extra money.



But as the size of that debt starts to go down and month after month it gets smaller and smaller and the interest payments get smaller and some of the credit cards get paid off and all of a sudden there is more money in the family budget, that extra hard work and careful cost cutting will have all paid off and everyone will breath a sigh of relief because you took the credit card down the same way you ran it up, one month at a time.

Taking Action on Credit Card Debt Before it’s Too Late

There may be some comfort for you if you are facing the rising threat of credit card debt in your family finances. That comfort might come from the fact that this is a problem for thousands of families in the country. But this is faint hope because it is still a problem that needs to be solved and solved by you.



But before you start to examine what you can do about your credit card debt problem, you have to ask yourself why so many people in our country have let themselves get into this fix. Well, there are a lot of reasons why a family’s economy goes negative so the bills overwhelm the income and the credit card debt starts to go up. It could come from a lost job, a health emergency, the need to get the kids through college or other reasons. It isn’t always that you got into credit card debt because you were lazy or because you are the type of people who just like to live high on the hog.



It might also be comfort to know that there are people further along in the credit card crisis that they are having to think about selling their homes or declaring bankruptcy. But again, that may not be as much comfort as a cold warning of what might be lying ahead for you if you cannot find a way to put a stop to this rising flood of credit debt. But there is one difference between those people who have reached that level of desperation and where you are today. And this is the difference that you can take comfort in because this one fact will be the one that will keep you and your family from getting to that level of desperation.



That comfort is that if you are this worried about credit card debt as it is just not starting to become a problem, they are not too late in getting with it to stop the problem before its too late. Its really an amazing thing but one reason so many people are in deep trouble over their credit card debt is partly because they looked away from the problem for so long and did not decide to take decisive and serious action to stop the problem from overtaking them when it was still possible to stop it.



Psychologists have a word for what happens when you are in big trouble and you refuse to believe it. That word is denial. And even though these thousands of people who let their credit card debt problem get out of control are not in need of psychiatrists, for some reason there is a real tendency to ignore this problem month after month and year after year until it overwhelms you and its too late for some of the solutions that could stopped the problem early.



So if you suspect you may have a credit card debt problem starting to grow under your nose, take action now. Don’t wait thinking it will somehow dry up and blow away on its own because it won’t. Don’t spend time thinking that a few thousand dollars of credit card debt will cap and you will slowly work it down. Go back to the basics and examine your budget and evaluate if you are living above your means. And if you are, well to put it simply, fix it! And when your lifestyle is in balance with your income, your budget will stabilize and you will be able to use credit cards wisely and not see massive debt result. It’s never too soon to take action and if by taking action, you stop the problem in its tracks, you will be one of the families who handled credit card debt wisely, by avoiding it entirely.

Stupid Credit Card Tricks

There has been an ongoing skit on the David Letterman Show called “Stupid Pet Tricks”. It was an aptly named bit because the things people teach their pets to do are truly silly. Letterman did so well with that skit, he followed it up with another series called “Stupid People Tricks.” Well, when it comes to the dozens of credit card offers that you get in your mailbox every week, you might think that some of these credit card companies would like to be on the next series called “Stupid Credit Card Tricks”.



These promotions that you get for credit cards seem to be playing on just about every tactic they can find to get you to take out yet one more credit card. You would think that the fact that credit card debt is a virtual epidemic in this country would let the credit card companies know that its time to get on the side of the consumer to learn responsible use of credit. Instead they do all they can to get you to have more, not less, credit cards and use them as much as you can.



We need to be smart consumers because as much as credit card companies try to make credit cards seem fun and happy and like big toys in your wallet, they are not toys. We should never forget that a credit card is nothing more than a way for the credit company to extend to you dozens of small unsecured loans that they will create credit payments on the fly to enforce through your credit card bill that will include high interest rates and additional fees as they see fit.



This is not to say that having a credit card is not a good thing. Good credit is one of the real assets any responsible adult will use to help make life easier and to make the necessary purchases in life. And more and more credit is becoming the currency of choice replacing cash and checks as the preferred method for paying for gas, at restaurants and any more even at retail outlets and grocery stores.



While the spread of credit as actual currency is a fact of life for us, it is also a major move by the credit card companies to take over the economy and to make you even more dependent on them. So the best defense is to take charge of your credit card life and make sure that you are the boss of your credit cards, not the other way around.



The stupid credit card tricks can be really fun to look at and sometimes enticing. They will appeal to your sense of school pride by giving you a credit card in your college school colors. You can get credit cards that give donations to save the environment, help the poor or create a college fund for your kids. There are all kinds of premiums, cash back concepts, frequent flier miles and gifts and toys that credit card companies will fork over just to lure you into getting more credit cards and using them a lot.



To put it bluntly, you and I need to learn not to be suckers for these deals. We can laugh at the stupid tricks they try to use. But if a credit card company is going to try to trick you into getting a card or using one, they are not doing business honestly with you. You want a credit card company that deals straight with you. They should offer fair rates that don’t change at the drop of a hat. They should sustain a reasonable credit limit and not always be jacking it up to try to get you to buy more stuff on the card. And they should have good customer service and be ready to renegotiate your relationship with them so you are getting good value from their service, not just paying for a bunch of toys and frills that do you no good whatsoever.



By keeping in mind what a credit card company actually does and that credit cards are mature adult tools, not games or toys, we can keep in perspective how to use our credit cards and how to keep from abusing credit which will lead to the nightmare of credit card debt.

Manage but Don’t Be Managed by Credit

The epidemic of credit card debt in the last five years would make you believe that credit cards are a bad thing. By themselves, credit cards are not bad. They not only can be a tremendous convenience, in many situations a credit card is absolutely essential. And building a good credit history and reputation is just one of the ways you go about establishing yourself as a viable financial entity in our society.



But like everything else in life, you can handle credit well or handle it poorly. It is when you start being pushed around and living in slavery to your credit card debt that you start to feel like a victim. So to regain control over your financial life, you have to manage your credit cards and the debt you owe there and don’t let it be the boss of you.



The number one rule of managing your credit card debt is to eliminate fees and any charges other than the interest rate itself. So you must make it a hard and fast rule never to be late on a payment. Being late is a disaster not just because the credit card company will tack on another $30-$50 fee to your debt for a late payment. Being late on a payment is also an alarm to the credit card companies that can set them off raising your rates, demanding excessively high minimum payment levels and passing along negative reports about your credit score.



To make sure you are never late, keep a good tracking system going every day so you know what credit card payments you have coming in and when they will come due. Then you can look at your income and begin to balance what you are making with what you need to come up with to at least make a minimum payment on each card. Now, many credit card management articles and advisors say never pay the minimum payment. This is bad advice. There is one situation where you not only should but must make at least the minimum payment and that is to keep from paying late. Far better to pay the minimum amount on time than to go late just to pay an extra few dollars on your balance.



Also keep an eye on the additional fees your credit card company or companies are charging you. If they are adding fees for credit protection or membership fees, its time to call them and either have those fees dropped or terminates the credit card. Don’t worry because you can terminate a credit card even if you still are carrying a debt balance on that card. They will hold the account open until you pay it back but close it to any further charges.



Taking your creditors by the scruff of the neck and making them play ball is the way you become the boss of your credit rather than it being the boss of you. Next to additional fees and charges, getting control over your interest rate is the next area of focus so you can be paying more on your debt level and less in interest. You can also call the credit card company and negotiate a better interest rate. Don’t let them push you around. The credit card business is tough and competitive and they do not want to lose you as a customer. So don’t be afraid to let them know you will close that account if you cannot get a rate you can live with.



By being the boss of your credit, you not only can make a plan to get out of debt, you will get the good feeling that you are handling a tough situation rather than being handled by it. And that sense of control is worth a lot, especially when you are starting to put some controls on something as easy to lose control of like your credit card debt levels.

Make the Credit Card Companies March to Your Tune

Does it ever seem like credit card companies seem to treat their customers like indentured slaves? The policies that these credit companies use to handle your accounts are at best unscrupulous and at worst, down right outrageous and robbery. If any other industry tried to cheat their customers out of money like the credit card companies successfully do every day of the year, they would be investigated and jailed with a vengeance. But our government doesn’t do that so the credit card companies literally have a license to steal.



The way these companies handle your accounts has a lot to do with why your credit card debt is so hard to get rid of. When you owe a few thousand dollars to a credit card company and they are constantly slapping you with fees, jack up your interest rates and adding charges to your account for “membership dues” and bogus things like this, it becomes clear that in addition to the debt, the debt carriers are the enemy, not your friend in trying to get your debt down.



You can put them on notice and make them march to your tune but you are going to have to “be the boss” to get that to happen. But if you get dozens of credit card offers and perhaps have a half dozen credit card accounts already open, you may have the flexibility to put them on notice that they credit card companies have a job of serving you, not you serving them.



To make these arrogant companies face the music, they have to know that they can be fired. To put them on notice, first make sure you know what they are up to. Get a year’s worth of statements and track the extra fees, the membership dues and each time they jacked up their interest rates on you.



Then armed with that information, call them and demand to talk to someone who can make changes to your account. If the clerk doesn’t want to play ball, start the process of closing the account. That will get their notice. You might have to actually close the account but don’t miss the chance to make comments when they come to the part of the process where they ask why you are closing the account.



This is where you get your licks in. You can leave as the reason something like this. “I am closing the account because you are imposing unreasonable fees and membership dues and I want the interest rate dropped to a certain rate and capped.” That will get some attention. You will either get to a manager right away or one will call you. Be prepared for a bunch of lame excuses and don’t argue. They can say they raised your interest rate because you were late on a payment so this is a penalty. Ok fine. Then a good answer is, “I have a policy of not paying you for work you do not do. So my policy says I drop the account.” As long as you stay on your strength, there is no answer they can give.



The secret weapon you know and that they don’t want you to know is that you are a premium customer. The credit card companies know there are a limited amount of people who can carry a debt and make the payments. And each time they lose a customer, that pool of victims, or customers, goes down. And don’t be fooled by any talk that they have no leverage to change the rules of the game. They can and they will. You can demand they rebate to you all charges imposed since last year. They can scream that you are being unreasonable all they want. You are within your rights to respond, “It’s unreasonable you impose fines and fees on my account without notice and for no additional value or work that you are doing. Its usury and I am within my rights to close this account and file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and with the US Attorney General.”



This is not just scare tactics. These are words credit card companies live in fear of hearing. So use the tools you have and put the credit card companies on notice that they are going to march to your tune or, to borrow a catch phrase from Donald Trump, “You’re fired”.

Inside Out Credit Card Management

When the economy or personal issues and problems result in a high credit card debt, we often find our debt spread over three or four or more cards. So you may have a Visa, several MasterCards, a Discover card and a Capital One card and maybe many more each carrying several thousands of dollars of debt. The result is an ugly parade of bills from each company each needing a minimum payment that pays the interest and takes just a small amount off of your debt.



If it seems that the debt mountain never seems to go down, that’s not an illusion. The situation is not designed to help you get that debt down. It’s a cruel mixed message the credit industry sends us because if you have high credit card debt, your credit rating goes down. But even if you have too much debt, the credit card companies just keep raising your credit ceiling and sending more and more credit card offers to lure you into more debt.



The instinct is to keep taking out more accounts and transferring money to those deceptive zero percent offers that expire in a matter of months and leave you with yet another bill to pay that only makes managing that debt even more impossible. If you do get a little money ahead, the instinct is also to pay more down on the debts that have the highest interest rates to try to slow the erosion of your finances due to high rates.



But there is another approach to handling this debt that goes completely opposite your instincts and gives more control to you to begin seeing headway against those debts. But to use this approach, you will have to think with your head, not your emotions and not panic but think about how to get as much principle paid down as possible. This inside out approach to paying down your credit cards is simple and gives you a roadmap to freedom from debt.



First of all, stop taking out more accounts. That only gives another credit card company access to your money. They can charge you membership fees and try to lure you with credit insurance. If you have three or more credit resources already, that’s plenty.



Second, use short term offers wisely. If one of your existing accounts offers you a zero percent deal for a few months, take it but transfer a small amount to that account. Then you can focus on paying off that transferred amount and see 100% of your payment go against principle which is the fastest way out of debt.



Third, pick a card and pay it off. It might be the card with the lowest balance which is one you might give the least to so you can respond to the higher level debts. But if you pay that card off, that is one less bill coming in each month and it gives you a great feeling to know you are slowly killing off the monster of credit card debt one card at time.



That brings us to the cornerstone of the inside out method. Instead of paying on the card with the highest interest rate, pay them the minimum payment and put your excess funds against the cards with the lowest rate. In this way you are getting the most bang for your buck with the small amount of extra funds you may have to pay on the debt. That debt will go down more quickly and then you can attack the bigger accounts and begin to whittle away at them too. And by using a smart approach to the credit card debt you have, you take control of the problem and put it on a program to go away. And that will be the greatest feeling of them all.

Divorce and Credit Card Debt

When a marriage comes to an end, it’s always a tragedy. Of course the rending of the family unit and the difficulty for the kids is the hardest thing about separating at divorce. But the difficulty of separating one house into two can be difficult and tedious to say the least. You have to go from one checking account to two, two homes instead of one and separate accounts for everything from credit cards to utilities.



The is an additional overhead to how to handle a divorce situation if in addition to splitting your assets, credit card debt that may have been a part of the shared family financial picture also must be split up. To the credit card company, that family credit card is the property of that shared entity which was the marriage. So when the union splits up, the transition from a financial point of view of your accounts separating is not over night.



So one of the many issues to be discussed and a plan made for is how to separate that credit card debt. Whoever continues to hold the family accounts will continue to get those bills and be expected to pay them. Now the least preferable way to handle the debt is to build the payments into any forced settlement agreement such as child support. So at the time the divorce is final, the amount of the debt and the payments that must be made could be calculated and half of that put into the amount that the income generating partner must provide.



But that leaves the management of those credit card debts to one partner and the other one just has to pay a set amount. And if the credit cards get used by either partner, that legal amount would have to constantly be changed and that would prove to be a constant headache of administration.



If the divorce is a shared responsibility so each spouse can work with the other to adjust the financial picture in an advantageous way, then how to separate the credit card debt should be part of that planning. Part of that planning is how to use shared assets to pay down that debt. You may have a home that will be sold, retirement accounts or other assets that were set aside for the future of the marriage. Before you sell those things, close those accounts and distribute the funds, look at using the outcome to retire that shared debt.



But it’s likely some of that debt load will live on past the divorce. In those cases splitting into two individual accounts may be the way to go. In that way, if the family was carrying $10,000 in debt, if each marriage partner walks away with $5000 of the debt, that is at least fair and equitable and how each individual handles that debt is up to them.



There are two ways you can go about splitting the credit card debt. If the debt is with a carrier with whom you can negotiate and conduct a dialog, getting a meeting or having a conference call with the managers there would be productive. The credit card company would far rather negotiate with you how to handle this debt load then deal with it chaotically after the fact. So they may be willing to set up separate individual accounts and split the debt for you.



But you can always use the method many of us have used to manage credit card debt up until now. Each of you can set up some new separate credit card accounts. You no doubt have dozens of credit card offers coming in that you can use to kick off this process. Almost always part of the set up offers for these accounts are balance transfers. So if you take out individual accounts and use the balance transfers to move each partners shared part of the debt to those accounts, that would be a clean way to split the debt up.



There may be adjustments to be made to the 50-50 split idea based on who is the primary bread winner and maybe who ran up the debt and on what. But by negotiating the terms of how you are going to separate the credit card debt when you separate the marriage, that will be one more than that you are handling in a mature and responsible manner in the middle of a very tough situation.

Avoiding Credit Card Debt Before it Sneaks up on You

In this modern time where the economy has been such a challenge for everyday people like you and me to keep up, it’s easy to get into credit trouble when your credit bills begin to stack up. So if you are in the position to just start learning the ropes of the world of credit cards, there are a lot of things you can do to avoid credit card debt before it sneaks up on you and keep your nose clean, as they say.



This is an outstanding goal for you if you are just getting your first credit cards. If you know or talk to anyone who is battling tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, you know what a jail sentence it can be. Once that credit card debt gets that high, the time it will take even under the best of conditions to bring it down runs into the years if not decades. And for all that time, thousands of dollars of money goes down the drain to credit interest that doesn’t buy you any food, tickets to the movies or new clothes. It just goes away with no value to you at all.



But if you are new to the world of credit, getting a credit card is a good thing. But once you get one, keeping it under control is job one. You will find it amazingly easy to use a credit card once it comes. In fact, the retail world makes it difficult to conduct transactions any other way. You can pay for gas at the pump that way and even charge your groceries at the grocery store. And while all of these great uses for credit are helpful, you can end up with a whopper of a credit card bill at the end of the month. And if you don’t pay that bill off, that is the first step on a lifelong jail term in credit card debt jail.



So there are some guidelines you should follow to both use credit responsibly but also to keep building your credit rating which has a real value to you. Remember that what the credit card companies don’t tell you is that making a charge on a credit card is a loan. Even if you just charge ten bucks to go to the movies, you took out an unsecured loan to finance that movie ticket.



So once you start using a credit card, keep in mind that you will be paying back everything you run up on it. It is NOT free money. A good practice is to save every receipt every month and keep a running tally of what you have spent on credit. Now only can you use that to cross check your credit card, it keeps you honest because each time you add a charge to your credit card, you can update your tally so you know for certain that you will be able to pay it off when the bill comes.



Paying off the credit card each month is the number one best way to keep your credit problems under control. Now it isn’t a bad idea to let a little bit of the debt drift from month to month. This builds your credit history and credit rating which will pay you well down the road when you want to buy a larger purchase. But by staying on top of your credit and what is going onto your card, you will start out with the kind of habits that will lead to a life of good credit use without credit card jail. And that is a wonderful gift to give yourself early in life.