BRUCE MCLAREN: Credit card debt: The modern American way

SAN ANGELO, Texas - The quotable Mark Twain had some pretty strong opinions about money. To his way of thinking, a "lack of it was the root of all evil." However, he put it best when he said, "Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite — but they all worship money."

Money is a lot of things to many people. It is something to save for a rainy day when an emergency or some issue occurs that requires you to have some to alleviate the situation. Money can also be a facilitator to bring about results or assist in some way. Whether facilitating acquiring food, paying bills, saving for a child's college education or just being able to buy an ice cream cone, money is the medium that helps provide for these expenses, wants and needs.

Money comes in various forms. The most common, up until a few years ago, was cash. Currency was used in exchange for goods and services.

In the early 1950s a new form of money came into being. Called the credit card, this now famous piece of plastic allowed you to charge almost anything without the need to pay, up front, in cash. These cards were issued by banks who then, as now, charged interest for using that card. At one time, the amount of interest charged to your credit card was deductible from your federal income tax.

Some folks measured their status by the number of credit cards they carried in their wallet. However, minimum monthly payments led ultimately to people owing more money spent charging items to their credit cards than they had in cash or bank accounts. A vicious cycle developed that found people acquiring new credit cards so they could draw on charge limits to pay off older cards.

The cycle of spending money you did not have, often to buy items you really did not need, has led us, to a great extent, into the recession we are living with at this time.

Electronic banking and debit cards also have replaced cash and currency forms of money. Both will work as long as you have the funds in your checking or savings account to meet payment requirements. If the funds are not residing in those accounts when charges or payments are to be handled, the lending institution, which made debit cards and electronic banking so attractive, can make life miserable for you.

Let me go back to plastic money, or credit cards. I am sure that if we lived in a perfect world, our ability to avoid credit card debt would be the norm. In that sense, we would never have to deal with the desperation of facing credit card payments and late fees. In that world, it would be nice to not live in fear of having creditors and collection agencies hounding us for payments.

Coupled with that, in our perfect world, I doubt we would worry about being able to afford what we really needed because every cent of our income was going toward keeping up with the minimum payments on our credit cards.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world. Many of these concerns are real for many people. They live from payday to payday in a death spiral of minimum payments. They live in fear of a knock at the door from a collection agency coming to take back the TV set, stove or one of their three cars, boat, motorcycle or other toy.

Some folks will offer the excuse that getting into debt is part of life. That is a false assumption. A better, more meaningful way to explore this whole idea of debt is to ask why and how you got there in the first place.

Some questions you need to ask and answer are: Why do you have that many credit cards to get items you really do not need? Why did you keep charging those items you could not afford? What really brought about your compulsive buying behavior?

The first place to break the cycle is to face those factors that give you the urge to splurge. Get control of your spending and get rid of a dependence on plastic money. If your income is only going to pay off yesterday's purchases, many of which have long since worn out or been forgotten, how do you plan to pay for the things you truly need for tomorrow?

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