Where We Stand: Credit Cards

As I’m working on some pretty spreadsheets to show our financial ‘picture,’ I added up our credit card debt. This is just the credit card debt alone, no cars, no house, no assets that are tied to these accounts. All told, we owe roughly $45,000, for nothing. We have nothing to show for the $45,000 we’ve borrowed.

Of course, there’s a TV in our living room and a computer at my desk, and plenty of other ‘things’ we spent the money on, but we could have saved for that stuff! That way we’d have it all, free and clear.

This leads to a new problem. We’ve become accustom to the lifestyle. The ability to buy what we want whenever we want it has been great. But the cold realization is that we’ve been able to buy what we want when we can’t afford it. So, in addition to having to break the habit of spending the bank’s money, we also have to curb spending even more to pay down the debt in a reasonable time. Debt sucks.