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Why Most Americans Should Not Use Credit Cards

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Most Americans should not use credit cards
Scott Lester
COM/156
February 27 2011
Suzanne Delger

Most Americans should not use credit cards
796,500,000,000. This is an incredibly astounding number, what do you suppose it represents? It is clearly too large even for the world population which currently sits at 6.4 billion people. This number is in fact the total U.S. revolving debt, 98% of which is made up of credit card debt, as of November 2010 according to the Federal Reserve’s report(2010) on consumer credit. There is no doubt that America is in the middle of a recession, historically speaking one of the worst ever, and credit cards are being widely overused and abused making the situation worse instead of better.
There are certain things that people depend on, the basic essentials such as food and shelter. People very rarely realize one of the most important factors that we all depend on throughout our daily lives is our earning power. It is our earning power that gives us our homes, cars, food, water, and our dreams and our goals. Sadly though, this is not enough for Americans, when the earning power is not enough to give us the things we all want and demand right now, what do we do? Of course we mortgage our earning power and our future with credit cards.
The administrative office of the U.S. courts lists an astounding total of 1.5 million bankruptcy cases were processed between June 2009 and June 2010. With that 73.4 % of those bankruptcies were a direct result of over extension of credit or credit cards according to totalbankruptcy.com. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported in January (2010) there are 609.8 million credit cards held by U.S. consumers. That breaks down to 3.5 cardholders per household carrying with that an average credit card debt of $14,750 per household.
Let’s look at debt; debt is defined as an amount owed to a

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