 Getting
the debt monkey off your back
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Does the prospect of opening your credit card statements
this month frighten you? It's likely that millions of others are
dreading it, too -- and not only because minimum
payments on credit cards have gone up this month.
We tend to party hard and go on spending sprees in
December, only to wake up in January to the sobering reality of
more debt on the ledger.
Since 2000, Americans' outstanding credit card debt
increased 18 percent, according to figures tracked by the Federal
Reserve.
During the 1990s, the amount of debt racked up by
consumers more than doubled. One
survey puts the average credit card balance among low- and middle-income
households at $8,650. Collectively, our debt situation continues
to worsen over time.
Let's reverse that trend and make 2006 the year we get credit card
debt off our backs for once and for all!
The more things change ...
The inability to live within one's means goes back a long way. If
fiction reflects reality, consider the character John Willoughby
in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," published in
1811. Willoughby's "estate had been rated ... at about six
or seven hundred [pounds] a year; but he lived at an expense to
which that income could hardly be equal, and he had himself often
complained of his poverty."
Credit cards were nonexistent in those days, so the quickest way
to wealth was to marry well. Willoughby used this strategy, and
in the process broke the heart of the pretty and poor protagonist
Miss Marianne, whom he had been leading on. A sympathetic friend
of Marianne assessed the scoundrel this way: "Nothing in the
way of pleasure can ever be given up by the young men of this age."
Now, doesn't that sound like something you might hear
today? (Add "women" to obviate sexist overtones and make
it more current.)
OK, things have changed since the days of horse-drawn carriages
and letters sent by post. For one thing, up until around the mid-19th
century, those who were unable to meet their obligations were often
sent to debtor's prison for the "wantonness of pride, the malignity
of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation," in
the words of Samuel Johnson, who sympathized with imprisoned debtors,
not creditors. No wonder: The litterateur of the 18th century suffered
poverty most of his life.
In these relatively freer times, we don't worry about incarceration
as a consequence for owing money, but we nevertheless feel debt's
stranglehold.
Freedom from debt
Today we live at a frantic pace, our attention constantly interrupted
by instant messages, e-mails, cell phones, beepers, etc. We seek
information or entertainment from multiple sources: the Internet,
television, radio, iPods, PDAs and other technological gadgets.
At the same time, friends, family members and bosses continue to
make demands on our time and energy. It's no wonder we forget to
focus on our personal finances.
Making change in our debt situation will require commitment
to the cause. We have to want to change, and we have to devote time to
it.
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