We all know that most countries in the world have been through a tough time financially and it iss easy to blame our personal debt onto that . Even some countries are trying to blame others and saying that they started it.

Maybe we should stop looking to pass on the blame and start to look for some errors we have made ourselves in our money life.

Let us look at the main area where we may be at fault:-

Credit Cards. Did we find those irresistible offers from the companies too much temptation and succumb?

All through the past twenty years there has been so many offers designed by the financial institutions to lure us into taking their particular card.  They were giving us 0% credit for a period of time and similar offers.  What we did not realize was that, after the initial persiod ended, their interest rate would go up considerably.

When the letter announcing that dropped through our mail box did we just ignore it and accept the higher rate like most people do.  Or were we sensible and look for another offer.

When we got the bill each month did we immediately look for the little box that said “Minimum Payment” and send that off to the company?

Of course we should have realized that that would mean that we had to pay interest on all the money that we did not pay off.  So we immediately started the following month with a balance of a few dollars for which we had got no goods and no benefit.

It got worse though, the next month, when we did the same, that starting balance was a few more dollars and this continued month after month until we found that we could not even afford the minimum balance amount.  Sound familiar?  Chances are you then tried to get a loan to pay it all off and found that your credit rating was not good enough.

Hopefully you are someone who is not in this position so let us look at how you can avoid it.

Firstly the best idea is not to have a credit card at all but that is getting difficult particularly if we want to do some of our shopping online.  However determine to use cash as much as you can.  It seems worth more money when you pass over dollar bills than when you just give them a card.

Consider getting a prepaid credit card.  They work just the same as a normal card except that you can only use the amount of money that you load onto it.  So, if you want to buy something for $50 from Amazon, load that onto the card and you cannot be tempted to buy other things that you do not really need.

Build up an emergency fund.  We all know that emergencies do occur so it is a good idea to put a little aside for the new car tires or the new refrigerator as you can then buy them in full rather than having to put them on a card and pay interest for ever.  It should be built up as high as possible and then it can even tide you through serious things like job loss or illness.

In my opinion there are not many debt situations which have are totally out of someones control.  It just takes a little preparation up front and a lot of willpower to avoid the debt trap.


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