Interesting Articles on living without Credit Cards

This morning when I was looking through the news I saw an article that caught my eye. Actually it was a series of stories about 5 people who decided to live without using credit cards and only using cash and debit cards. The article from CNNMoney.com had some very interesting points and some points that I did not agree with also.

Two of the 5 people in this series had either stopped paying on the debt they racked up or negotiated payment settlements with the credit card companies. I do not know their situations in depth, but I find it very hard to rationalize walking out on a debt owed.

John Wilder simply stopped paying on $12,000 in credit card debt. This is a relatively small debt in the grand scheme of things to just say, nope, I am not going to pay you back!

Dawn Tulman and her family negotiated payment settlements for their debt. They admitted hey we are in way over our head and we will do what we can to pay you back as much as we can. This is much easier to swallow, especially with a family to raise and being self employed.

Most people try to justify this action with the a statement similar to "it was the credit card companies fault, they raised rates, or they would not lower payments, or they expected to me to pay on time..." And they also held a gun to these peoples head forcing them to purchase stuff they really did not need.

I know there are situations where people do get in a ton of debt through no fault of their own and have no way out and have to ask for help or protection from creditors, but the vast majority of people have brought it on themselves. I can say this with no apprehension and without looking down on people! I know, we did this to ourselves by having no patience in waiting to purchase things and making bad financial decisions.

Some of the key things that I liked about this article was points such as 1) keeping track of all purchases 2) budgeting and planning for future expenses 3) waiting 1 week to make a decision if you really need that impulse buy 4) setting money aside in savings as a cushion and for emergencies.

We still have not our budget yet, we keep making excuses and putting it off. But we need to set a hard date of January 1st to set our budget and stick to it. Otherwise we will never get out of debt. We continue to do much better on many fronts, but still need to make the commitment of a cash based budget. And I really need to cut out the pop and junk food at work!!!!