centennial credit cards
We spent our first centennial on credit cards. We went from paying $50-100 a year for $200-500 credit cards in the 1970s, to paying $1,200-2,000 a year for those same cards by the time we hit our sixtieth birthday. We paid for those cards with our first centennial.
The credit cards are the standard bearer, and the cards are the cardholder. They are pretty easy to buy, but the more we use them, the more we’re stuck with them.
Credit cards have changed dramatically since they were first introduced. For the last 100 years the average annual charge was around $4.00. Today it’s about $100.00. They charge $1-2 for every $1.00 they make. In the last year alone, Visa was giving away $35-$45 million in free cards. In the last year alone they made $60 million in new charges.
The reality is that the average cardholder has been getting a bill every other month for the last six years. This is a shame because it means each one of them has to pay the same amount each month, and that means less money in the bank. The problem is that a lot of people are using credit cards to buy things they don’t actually need in order to feel debt free.
My best friend and I got started in the early 2000’s when we had a serious problem with our local bank. We all thought we’d become a regular bank. We had issues with several banks, but the issue was that we had to use the old credit card that was no longer allowed in the Bank of America. We called the bank that had an old card and asked them if we could fill out a form to get our new credit card.
The Bank of America had all the old cards they had to be able to take a look at your old one and get rid of it. They did. They just didn’t take it. They said that they had already replaced all the old cards, but that didn’t matter. They just didn’t need a credit card.
I’m all for banks being forced to do the right thing, but when your credit card is as old as mine, you have to wonder why this particular bank was allowed to be so generous.
I think that credit cards are, at their core, a way for a bank to control your spending and your life. You have to give it to them to be able to use it. The idea that we, as consumers, are able to give a bank a large amount of money with no strings attached is a good thing. It’s a way to allow a bank to make money off of you without having to actually make you anything.
When you’ve got a credit card, your spending habits are always at the mercy of the bank. You can always cancel it if you don’t like the way it’s doing things. But you also have to remember that the bank can just take it all. All you have to do is give them the money and they can do anything with it.
The good news is that once we have a credit card, we are able to buy more stuff as a way to pay for it. But there is a downside to having a credit card. They can take it away, or they can just start charging interest on it. This can be a great way to spend an entire month or a year. Its like having a credit card with a 20% rate per month and then only having one credit card in your name.