Personal Finance: American credit card debt, and how it compares to other forms of private debt (e.g., mortgages, vehicle loans, student loans). How has credit card debt changed over the last few years?

Raise your hands ( ok not literally ) or who’s with me in saying that credit cards suck and are stupid. They suck because they only cause you financial problems and put you into debts! Credit cards are stupid because well, for the same reason lol! For example, today you stand in line at Starbucks and people use credit to buy a $4 cup of coffee. I mean that’s crazy to just think “Ill get a cup of coffee and I’ll just use my- Credit Card that’s right, I’ll just be stupid and use my credit card and increase my financial problems/extra debt! Yea that’s totally a great idea! Not! If you intend to keep buying coffee using a credit card you’re gonna have to pay off all those tiny little debts that will now become a whole pile of problems for you. I wouldn’t want this for all of you and I doubt y’all want that either. So my suggestion is never to use credit cards, especially if you’re bad at repaying the debt. If you take the personal finance courses I suggest to listen carefully because, the skills that you learn throughout the course, you’re going to take this with you in your future life.

Now back to how credit cards have changed, companies like Visa and MasterCard, which maintain networks of financial institutions lending the money and collecting fees every time a card is used, have become spectacularly wealthy through this easy access to credit. Visa’s recent initial public offering was the largest in U.S. history, while MasterCard’s stock has soared nearly 500 percent since it went public two years ago, their markets overseas growing like wildfire. But while most cardholders pay off their debt, there remains a very dark side to the credit card, and as Adam Levin ( co-founder of San Francisco-based credit.com ) says, “a deceptively simple device that has the capability of destroying you.”

That’s all for my essay today, I will post a few more this Friday, I also hope you learned something new or liked my thoughts about this credit card topic. ( I think I wouldn’t have talked about this if it weren’t for the assignment ) but anyways, as always, THANKS for reading this essay, I’m open to any critics on punctuation errors and grammar in general.

~AL