Hello,
My husband and I got suckered into the Great American Credit Card nightmare and saw our balances shoot up alarmingly fast. Well, we finally got enough money together to pay the damn things off and lo and behold...
After we paid off Fleet Credit Card Services, we received a bill for $44. I was told that although we did indeed pay off the entire balance of $5,000 that we still owed that $44 for 8 days of interest! And the interest was at 26%! I told them that was not the agreement. Well, they said that a year ago we received a "revised" cardholder agreement in the mail which stipulated the "new" policy of CHARGING 26% INTEREST ON YOUR BALANCE WHEN YOU PAY OFF YOUR CARD.
We learned our lesson. We cancelled every credit card we owned after paying them all off. We refuse to use a credit card to buy so much as a stick of gum. That stick of gum charged to your credit card could very well wind up costing you over $1,000!!!
We now have a savings account and have decided to stuff money in that and accrue interest while we are saving towards our goals. We'd rather do it the old fashioned way and WAIT on those consumer purchases and get paid while we wait (through interest in our CD or savings account) than shell out interest that would make a loan-shark blush.
I thought about this the other day and realized that I haven't lost a second's sleep from worrying about all the "Gotta have it" watchamacallits our society says we should buy to make us happy. But I did lose quite a bit of sleep worrying about how we were going to pay off that huge burden of credit card debt that slowly and insiduously grew larger everyday.
Don't get suckered into putting yourself in debt to buy a bunch of junk you don't need.
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