Credit Cards - Why it is can be destructive

I used to own a piece of plastic known as the Credit Card. With this card, you can pay for things with money you have to earn in the future to pay it back.

It's like having an extended wallet from the wallet for buying things which I could barely afford.

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I had two cards. had, now I do not have even a single card.

I was a slave for a decade. Had to pay around 100 usd per month on interest. Both my credit cards combined to a total of around 4500 usd. Everytime I had paid for the minimum amount which was a required payment by credit card companies, you could use your credit card again. Everytime I paid the minimum amount, I was gonna impulsive buy some stuff again. I was caught in this debt trap.

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With the credit card, I tricked myself into thinking that I could pay for my new purchase everytime. I was trapped. It was really stressful paying my credit card debt. I kept having nightmares of how unsucessful I was. Until one day, my mom intervened.

2017 May. I had already been a credit card slave for a year but I had a weapon. It was that I've been paying my monthly insurance which was investment linked for about a decade. My mom was the one who suggested to me about checking how the amount that was accumulated in the investment part of my insurance. It was just enough to settle the lump sum of the debt with left overs. I took it out and fully paid my credit card and cancelled the card.

One thing about credit card is that, if you don't cancel it or report it to be lost, these companies would give you a new one. I finally broke free.

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Salvation. My mom had saved me.

I have been free of the plastic ever since. It's pretty hard sometimes to not be able to purchase anything expensive on credit ever again. The money paid into things that I buy impulsively usually ends up to be thrown away years later (my experience). Why not then, I take that cash and put into an investment account that is gonna be part of my retirement nest. I am going to present a table that I saw in Tony Robbins book Unshakeable, that shows a table which is an investment compounded yearly for thirty years.

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This is a good book. In Malaysia, there is a bookstore that sells the cheapest books at around MYR 19.90 which is on average 5 usd per book for hardcovers and so on. They buy those new books that publishers meant to destroy due to overprinting.

When I buy things now, I think twice. I have to keep money to buy the things I want instead of just buying it for the sake of buying it. I am a happier person nowadays with the big chunk of debt offloaded from my shoulders.

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