Credit Cards : A Love Hate Relationship // Part #1: The Credit Card Rollercoaster
This post is part of a credit card series & I want your input!
Click the button at the end of the post to ask me all your burning credit questions.
I’ve had my fair share of credit card rollercoasters. If I’m being brutally honest with myself, my credit card history feels eerily similar to my pre-husband dating history -- I would find a guy who seemed pretty good, the benefits were decent and then one thing lead to another and all of a sudden things would be completely out of hand. At best I’d end up having some annoying crap in my house that I’d have to figure out what to do with, at worst, with a steaming pile of shit to clean up (thankfully not literally).
Like many Americans, I got a credit card in college. My relationship with it started out okay, but only because I completely ignored it. I was already in the habit of using my debit card (and was privileged with parents who deposited a set amount of money for my “needs” each month).
After graduating two things happened simultaneously: my parents stopped helping out and I re-discovered this magical piece of plastic that I’d had lying around for ages. At first, I did pretty well at using the card and paying it off each month, but some time early on in my teaching career my relationship with money hit a low point. I was actively working on not accessing the feelings that kept coming up around money and, instead of reacting with caution, I responded by spending with almost complete abandon. I bought things on my card that I knew I couldn’t afford with the belief that “one day it’ll be fine.” In the beginning there were some months that I was able to completely pay off the card, but slowly those months got fewer and farther apart. Eventually I got to the point where I barely looked at my bills, threw random amounts of money at them and often ended up trying to pay off so much that I ended up just needing to use the cards again at the end (or middle) of the month. That sinking feeling was the same feeling I had with my string of “not so great choices” in men. I would let them stick around for longer than I should have and put up with a lot of pain because it was so much easier than admitting I needed to work on my own emotional well-being.
I was lucky that no super expensive emergencies came up while I was riding the credit card roller coaster. If a major medical or car bill had made a surprise appearance (their favorite sort of appearance), I would’ve found myself in a situation I couldn’t get out of on my own.
It took years of personal research (deep dives into the crazy world of online money blogs, tons of books, and, maybe most importantly, creating curriculum for my teenage students at the time), attending grad school, starting a new career, and loads of emotional work for me to finally get off of that credit card debt rollercoaster. I’m here to share everything I’ve learned so that you don’t have to do all that work on your own!
Help me help you -- this is the start of a series on credit cards and I want your input! What questions do you have about credit cards? What do you want to know so that you can finally dump that toxic boyfriend?
