Aren’t Credit Cards Non-Biodegradable? *for your budget that is

Back in the ‘good o’l days’ to be in debt was to be in sin.  Now days if someone does not own a credit card they are ‘backwards.’  So what is a person to believe?  Every generation seems to have a motto, in today’s ‘modern’ society the most common seems to be- “Just charge it.”  While some may suppose that credit cards are ingenious creations of plastic money, others wonder if they are one of the devil’s evil plots to suck our souls into eternal servitude.You probably know what a credit card is; they are the little plastic wonders that mom and dad carry in their wallets, yet they are also the little plastic wonders that make mom and dad cry at the end of every month.  In addition, like most households, yours receives one of these engraved reservoirs about five times a week.While credit cards resemble little packages of money–they are in fact–not money.  They are actually figures, a fixed number that dictates when and how much you can spend; and for some reason the credit card issuer has somehow deemed your card a certain amount.  All of this of course makes buying things so much easier—however you aren’t really buying anything. The reason: money is an asset that you can obtain, and plastic-well, it’s simply plastic.  When someone purchases an item with money, they are trading an asset for another asset and so forth.  However, a credit card is a liability, or a promise to repay an obligation in exchange for the stuff you buy.  Unfortunately, eventually you will have to repay your debt with money, an asset.I know, I like you, became very confused by this process.  It seems that most of us could not enjoy our current living standards without borrowing of some sort.  Maybe if people began slicing credit cards instead of swiping, then perhaps a hefty amount of money could be saved along with a few Kleenex.       

~ by colormegray on February 21, 2008.