Credit for dinner, debt for breakfast

Credit card debt is responsible for causing economic uncertainty in America. Many families owe $40,000 or more on credit cards. They are constantly haunted by calls from credit card companies. Many families struggling to pay their mortgages or put kids through college say their real problem started with credit cards. The temptation to borrow a few thousand got them rolling into a debt avalanche.

According to one report, almost half of all bankruptcy cases stemmed from credit card debts. About 80 per cent of them were males. Slightly more than 70 per cent of bankrupts who cited excessive credit card debts were between 31 and 50 years old. America is a nation drowing in debt.

The common mistakes in financial planning are all, in one way or another, related to debt. Debt and lifestyle go hand in hand in American society. When you use debt to fund a consumptive lifestyle, not only do you have the consumptive lifestyle working against you financially, but you also have the additional burden of debt working against you financially. Both should be avoided like the plague!

Avoiding the use of debt is incredibly difficult because the promotion of credit card use has made credit so easy to obtain and the temptation to use credit or debt so overwhelmingly difficult to resist. Credit card companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to entice each of us to spend and to use credit with cards that make spending "easier", and those amounts are a pittance when compared to additional advertising dollars of retailers.

Conclusion

Lending institutions do not want people to pay their credit card debts each month because of the 18% to 24% interest that is earned on that credit card debt.

Today's Bottom Line

According to a banker in the banking industry, a person who uses his or her credit card for convenience sake and pays the debt off each month is known as a "deadbeat".

The Bible does show many ways to overcome any financial crisis. Many of these principles are laid out in our successful course, the Scriptural Financial Freedom series. To learn more, you can download the Small Groups kit from our estore.

Calculate your mortgage, credit card repayment, loan interest as well as your compounding interest and more with our 25 calculators!

This article is from