My brother used to work for a credit card company. He said it was common for people to have $20,000 or $30,000

of credit card debt.  

 That's scary. I don't carry credit card debt as a rule, I can't imagine owing that much on one.

I have no credit card debt. We have gone years without a credit card and this year we broke down and got one. My husband uses it for his spending and we pay the balance off each month.

We have had credit card debt in the past. When my husband was injured at work and had a year following with healing and little work, we put medical expenses and necessities on the cards. The $200 balance increased with these charges. I cut the cards and we began paying on the debts more than eight years ago. We owed a total of $8,000 and a great bit of it was interest. I made the last payment to these debts in February.

 I feel that $8,000 was far too much to have, $20,000 or more is just ridiculous to me.

 We have one cc we keep and pay it off every month.  We just paid every other one of them off in January of this year and cut each card over the fire pit.  Very exciting!  lol

Wow!  Harrington was my maiden name.  Where are you from?  Maybe we are related.  My Dad's name was Max or M.T. Harrington, his Dad's name was Hal.  Small world, huh.
Patrink

$18,000 here, coming down from $27,000.   For us, it started with the honeymoon and has since included 2 mortgages for 11 months, 9 months of unemployment for my husband, the downpayment for a car and a new fridge.  *sigh*

Just paid it all off in the last 6 months-and now I'm making double payments on my car.  Next-I'm going to tackle that mortgage.  I would really like to get it paid off before we retire.

We have always paid our credit cards on time - not in full but more than the minimum. THen one month I missed the notice that the period between bills and bill payment due was being shortened and suddenly I found out that if I didn't pay the bill within three days of receiving it,I was late. Within six months our interest rate when from 4% to 8% to 12%! That's when we stopped using any credit card. We are nearly paid off now. I really despise this whole credit system that pulls people down before they figure out how the game is played.

As we were paying down our debt, I opened three different saving accounts  on ingdirect.com and have faithfully put the 1/12 the amount I need each year to pay insurance/property taxes, college tuition bills, and a smaller amount in a general account each and every month. I no longer have to panic when a big non-monhtly bill arrives since I'm planning for it. This is what turned the tide for me. I used to try to save "SOME" money each month but it was never enough until I forced myself to look at one year's worth of bills and finally deal with them realistically.

I still find it difficult to hold the line on purchases.

peaceh

We did have all of our CC's paid off, and then like i always say SLAM, we get brought back down! Our phone company was going to cut off ur cell phone becasue for 3 months they had sent the bill to our old address and never phoned us when it came back to them..I was trying to get messages off of it and i couldn't,  so I phoned them and that is what they told me! yikes so now we have $275 dollars on the credit card becasue i had to use it to pay the bill immediatly! so so much for a run of good financial luck eh? GRRRRR i hate this world sometimes!

Will you need to cut back somewhere in the budget to get that paid off?