She said our credit will be increased by $250, so we better hurry and charge a TV on it. The ensuing discussion was bizarre.
“They are only charging us like $10 in interest a month that is nothing, we spend that on a pizza”:dubious:
“So are we just supposed to let the card sit empty? Why even have it then if we can’t use it?”:dubious:
Something I still don’t understand about it turning over every month and we will have more money available? Clarification was sought but not delivered.
“So we are supposed to do what? We still have to make the minimum payment every month whether we have $50 or $500 so we might as well have it maxed”:dubious:
She isn’t dumb I promise, she has achieved higher education than I have. But the credit card thing seems to be blocked somehow, like she isn’t getting it.
Well, no one is dumb anymore, that went out in the eighties.
Sit down with her and the fine print and teach her about interest, using the purchase price of the TV as an example. Show her how much that TV will cost in the end if you make only the minimum payments.
As a society, we have been programmed out of understanding money and debt except as a means to acquire as much as we can possibly grasp. I don’t find the OP’s wife’s blind spot odd at all.
Unless you have had her under a rock, she has heard all the reasons credit debt can be very bad & a person will get so far behind that there is little that can be done. ( Bankruptcy )
My wife is very competent at a doing anything she wants to do, but if its something she doesn’t want to do it, it’s like asking a 4 year old to do calculus.
My ex-wife was like that when we first met. To her credit (ha!), I explained it to her and she totally got it. She was a billing clerk at the time but now she’s a corporate controller. We actually rarely disagreed on money but we still ended up splitting.
She’s just a good American! I’m going to make up a statistic here and say that 91% of all Americans share her enthusiasm for acquiring material goods while 2.6% share your understanding of finance.
I don’t know how far I’d get in a discussion like that before losing my patience - credit is not money. Credit is debt. High-interest debt is usually bad (although quite good for sucking your money out of you without giving you anything in return). If you want a tv and you can afford a tv, go buy a tv. The credit card has nothing to do with that discussion.
grude, I don’t suppose your wife is very interested in the principle of spending only as much money as you earn each month (or less), which means not going into debt each month.
ETA: You can probably call your credit card company and tell them to stop raising your limit. I did that decades ago with my Visa, and they haven’t raised it since then.
She probably thinks she is very interested in it. She sees the minimum payment as completely affordable within the monthly budget, so why would anyone not get oodles of stuff when it only costs that little amount?
It’s very common, IME, for people to see debt payments as just another utility bill. All that matters is the monthly payment, because that’s as far as they budget. A five year car loan and a three year car loan are the exact same thing in their eyes if the payment is $300 a month.
Yeah, I was thinking of that - somehow you have to get these people to understand that making a minimum payment on your mountain of debt credit cards is NOT living within what you make each month.
Credit card companies hate people like me, who pay off the balance in full every month.
When my sister was in college, she got into trouble with her credit cards (as in she couldn’t even make the minimum payments) and our parents did the right thing and refused to bail her out. She considered dropping out of school for a semester, but instead signed up for every paid study she could do and bailed herself out that way. One of them was a malnutrition study that she was told could make her very sick but it did pay $500.
When I was first dating my now ex-wife, she got her first credit card. After several months she had built up quite a balance. One day she went out and bought an outfit and said to me, “it was on sale and it will hardly add anything to my monthly payment.” That’s when I realized that she didn’t have a clue. I sat her down and explained it and she totally got it. Now she wouldn’t dream of carrying a balance.
Why would they hate you? You do know they charge the merchants, right? Your use of the cards makes money for the issuing bank, the card company, and the processor, so they like you just fine if you keep your cards paid off.
You’d be shocked at the number of people who buy a car, or a house, and only look at the monthly payment. They don’t care how much they end up truly paying.
