Living without Credit Cards
Categorized: Credit Card Debt Help | No comments
I’m a child of parents who lived during the great depression. They went through it first-hand and it forever shaped the way they looked at and treated money. To say they were tight with a dollar would be an understatement; they held on to every penny they made. And neither one of them ever owned a credit card.
I of course was much different. I made more than my share of financial mistakes and, as a result, I had to learn the hard way about carefully managing my money and how to protect it. But, as painful as it was, it was nevertheless a lesson well learned. One I won’t forget.
The first thing I did on my road back to solvency was to re-examine my use of credit cards. My balances were very high and I had trouble making my minimum payments. I needed to do something different. So I went “cold turkey” with my credit cards and got myself a prepaid debit card instead.
That immediately got me thinking differently about my spending. I could only spend money I actually had now because reloadable debit cards have no credit line – you can only spend what you load onto them. I found myself buying only the things I truly needed and my impulse spending virtually stopped. I actually had a little money left over after the first month.
The other thing I noticed is that as the months went along I started carrying less and less cash. The prepaid card worked everywhere so I didn’t need cash – really. And that too reduced my spending. Soon I was using that extra cash to attack my credit card balances and after a few months I was seeing some real progress.
I wish I had learned these financial habits a lot sooner. I should have listened to my parents a little more. If I had, I’d be in a much, much better financial position right now. Still, my position is improving every month and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. Credit cards are a thing of the past for me.
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