Do You Remember Your First?
Do you remember when you got your first credit card? The excitement you felt? The urge to go out and buy something on it right away? Did you take your friends or family out for dinner to celebrate or was your first card a store card, like mine was. When you got your first statement in, did you casually look over the amount owing and just fixate on the minimum payment required? Hey that isn’t too bad, is it? I can afford that! So did you do like I did and keep spending? Then one day you realized that casually looking at the amount owing wasn’t going to work anymore – you can’t ignore it any longer. But what happened? You have been making the minimum payments, haven’t missed one, and you aren’t using the card that much so why doesn’t the amount owing get smaller? That’s an easy question to answer. Very little of the minimum payment goes towards the principal debt; it is eaten up by interest. Interest is how the lending institutions make money and they are going to make sur