I won't go into the details except to say that I have been trying to decide whether or not to use some balance transfer checks from my credit card company, but if I don't use them in time they somehow magically turn into cash advance checks with much worse conditions. I decided I didn't need to use the checks so screw em.

The point is, many people have accrued a significant amount of financial debt. It is really unfotunate because for some people, they find it really hard to get out of debt and many ways that 'help' end up screwing you worse if you aren't careful.

I'm sure that many of you are still young enough that you can change any bad spending habits, like charging hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of electronics equipment, just to keep up with everyone else. It will come back to haunt you if you are not responsible with the amount you charge.

Things like student loans can also hurt, but sometimes, student loans are a great investment. The key is to know what you are getting into. When I first started college I took loans out but never tracked what I owed. Eventually, I had to figure out how to pay it off, but for me it did help to have a college degree so it was a good investment, especially because my college debt was a reasonable amount.

Recently people have been buying houses they can't afford. Some of this is greed. Greed because they must have the 'American Dream' and greed because they wanted to buy houses at a low price and sell high. Some of it was poor financial mangement, due to inexperience or bad advice.

So in closing, no matter who you have been up to this point, take stock of your debt, learn how much time you have to pay it back, take care to optimize your purchases so you only consume what you need or what really is worth the money to make you happy, and always read the fine print.

burglar's ethics: don't rob anything that isn't replaceable.

I'm pretty lucky, my whole family had various pockets of money for me for post-secondary education and my mum payed what wasn't covered by that and then i just payed her back when i started working so i came into the adult world without debt. i have a deep and personal fear of debt so i try to stay out of it as much as possible, but i live alone with no dependants so it's easier for me than for many others.

In my job i see a lot of people in debt getting on payment plans and dealing with collection agencies or what you mentioned about people who help you by consolidating your debts and letting you pay them back slowly. I assume you are thinking of interest rates and credit history when you say they can screw you over more, am i close?

I saw a programme on tv where people buy crap houses for renovation and resell for higher, this one man put the entire renovation bill on his credit card (it was a lot of money don't remember exactly how much) which was a HUGE risk and it was worth it in the end but he went ahead on some developments before getting planning permission on it because of the pressure to finish before the debt caught up with him. =\ very scary.

Well consolidation, where you put all your (usually student) loans together so you only have one payment per month instead of several can be good if you are willing to pay the extra money over time that you end up paying, but sometimes consolidation can lock you into an interest rate that you cannot change so that if you could manage to pay your loans without consolidating, you end up paying more per month that what you were intending to pay. You need to be careful about knowing when and why you are consolidating, but it generally can help you and you usually can pay off more than your monthly amount if you have it so you can chip away at it quicker.

I'm talking about when someone is desparate to transfer balances from their high interest rate credit card (interest rates that are usually way higher than consolidation rates) to another lower interest rate credit card, but then when they do so they make a late payment either intentionally or by mistake, and then per the credit card agreement, the credit card company is allowed to raise the interest rate of this new credit card balance to a high amount, maybe even higher than your first credit card companies amount.

Or like what I was saying above in my first post, maybe when you are transfering the money from one card to another you use the checks they give you, but if they are not received by a certain date by the new company from the old one to indicate payment received, the new company can say "they expired, we will now treat it as a cash advance" which has a very high rate, even higher than purchases so if you use these checks just a little late, you could go from thinking you'd have an interest rate of 0% of the balance added to your principle balance for 6 months, to 20% starting to be added to your principle balance right away.

You might intend to act to get yourself out of debt, but if you aren't careful the credit card companies tricks, and they are tricks, I'm not being bitter, they are counting on people making these kind of mistakes to help make their money, cause you to end up being further in debt.

hmm, cus i see a lot of 0% on balance transfers and 0% on purchases for the first X many months on nearly every credit card advertised but i've never applied for one myself so i havn't read any of the fine print.

personally i would rather scrape and save for a long time to save up the money to buy something than deal with credit cards and stuff =S just seems really complicated.

there is actually a manga called zombie loan where this company loans you whatever amount of money (or something?) you need but then you have to kill zombies to pay it all back and of course you might die in the process cus it's dangerous and all, but every zombie you kill is worth something.. it's a pretty good story though ^_____^

Well even then, you'd have a chance at paying it back...as long as there are enough zombies.

Robber ethics: Take anything that will sell on the street for half or 75% of the value. Robbing houses will not guarantee you money and it will not guarantee you will come out alive.