They trap you with their innocence. Enticing you to spend ever more increasing amounts of ‘invisible money – money that is not really yours. They lure you into a trap of deceit and deception. Never allowing you, for one minute, to realise that the money you spend is really not your own, but borrowed. The credit card trap entices many millions of us into their lairs, and we are very lucky to even emerge again. Once we become embroiled into the tangled web of debt and ever more debt, then we fall into a spiral that many millions of us will never recover from.
The credit card trap is something that all of us know about, but we bury our heads in the sand. We know the money we are spend is not our own – unlike debit cards in which the money placed on them ‘is’our own money. However, with credit cards, they are armed with two major weapons that work against millions of people worldwide.
One is the weapon of subtleness. In other words, what you spend you cannot see, because no hard cash changes hands. So, therefore, you do not see the damage until much later on. The second weapon credit cards have is the APR [Annual Percentage Rate.] The Annual Percentage Rate only kicks in’ when you are late in paying your credit card bill.
This means that you not only have to pay the original bill, but the APR on top of that too. Some credit cards have a fixed- rate APR. This means that the APR will not go up, neither will it go down, during a ‘fixed’ period of time. However, other credit card companies can put the APR up or down at their discretion – which is normally ‘up’.
This means that while you may be paying a low APR rate one month, the next month it could be high. This is the weapon that all credit card companies use – in order to keep paying customers in line. And this is the thing that those of us who use credit cards, really have to be aware off.
The credit card road is ridden with many obstacles. There are many people who would say that the advantages of credit cards far outweigh the disadvantages – but that is not necessarily true. When mounting debt is spiralling out of control is it any wonder that many people now view credit cards with disdain and even fear?
They really are a trap by which mounting debt can build up unknowingly. Before you know it, you are knee-deep in a credit card debt which has spiralled out of your control. This is the trap by which all of us have arrived at, at some point in our lives. The problem is that once we are in credit card debt, how the hell do we get out of it?
The trick is to never reach that point of no return were we overspend and are then not able to pay back what we owe. We have to be able to control our spending with a credit card, and to realise that the money we spend is only ‘loaned’ to us. This money has to be paid back, so a credit card may make us feel ‘rich’ in the short-term’, but the cold turkey’ can be lethal.
So, to sum up, the credit card trap is full of pitfalls when purchasing the things we want. The downside is that the honey – which is the money – is presented to us on a sharpened knife. This ‘sharpened knife’ comes in the form of the APR [Annual Percentage Rate.] This rate is a very good friend of the credit card, but is not such a good friend to us – the owners of those cards. The credit card money we spend is not our own, and has to be paid back. The sooner we realise this the sooner we will be in better control of how we used credit cards.