Getting Free Of Credit Card Debt

Ok we have all been there with the credit cards and used them at times unnecessarily for products that we simply did not really need. I learnt from personal experience that credit cards are not your flexible friend and can turn very quickly into a flexible nightmare if you do not control your spending properly.

I had my first credit card at probably about the age of 19 or 20 I thought it was great out every weekend with my friends and buying myself new clothes for the occasion with my flexile friend. As always the card was set for so many months at 0% meaning that you only had a minimum repayment of £5 at the most, ok that’s no problem I thought. Then you get a few months down the line you have bought clothes and other unnecessary goods on the card and the balance has crept up without you noticing, this is probably because the hundreds of pounds of clothes you have on the card have only cost you £10 up to now as you have been keeping up with your monthly minimum repayment.

Your credit card has now finished its 0% period and normally jumps to some were in the region of 30% and your minimum payment jumps through the roof. You have got £550 on the credit card the bill has arrived and because of the interest rate on the credit card approximately £7 of whatever you pay on the balance goes to interest. Remember this interest is now added every month and will probably go up again after a short while. Before you know where you are you have taken on another credit card on top of the one you already have, this credit card again has a 0% period in order for you to go and enjoy yourself. Another few months down the line you now have two credit cards with balance’s over £500 meaning that you now owe over £1000 in total, remember your second card has also now ran out of its 0% period and you are being charged a bigger monthly payment. I could go on and on the process is endless unless you decide to sit up and do something about it.

So now you want to do something about it, well there are a couple of options which I explored, firstly it was paying off the credit cards on my own making a bigger payment that they were asking for every month. This did work initially but you soon get bored and slip back into your old ways. The route I decided to take was getting a bank loan not for that long only a year. This seemed to do the trick as you do not have any way of getting out of paying for a bank loan, during the year it gave me the chance to get my finances in order and I did not take on any more credit cards.

The cards are gone now and I can enjoy what I spend knowing that it is my money to spend and no one is going to bill me at the end of the month in relation to it.

I suppose to sum it up credit cards are not all bad as long as you know how to manage them properly for example transferring your balance at the end of 0% periods. I would say the best advice of all though is if you can’t afford it don’t buy it on a credit card.

I am not a financial expert as you can probably tell from the writing above, but I have given you my experience with cards and how I managed to get the upper hand. Thanks for reading!