Looking for good deals in credit cards despite the credit crunch? So are my friends.

They’ve been asking me if there are any good deals on credit cards, and for some info on how the economic crisis is affecting the credit card business. So I’ll give you the inside scoop I’ve been sharing with them.

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Credit cards and Christmas are as inseparable as bacon and eggs or Great and Expectations. It has become tradition to overspend and bury ourselves in credit card debt “for the sake of Christmas.”

Yet, when we cannot pay off those bills in January – and perhaps not in February, March, April, or May either – that isn’t a gift, but self-abuse. So maybe it’s time to adopt a new tradition.

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Credit card debt is just the latest scheme for getting people to “buy now and pay later.”

But when you buy with credit card revolving credit, the slogan should really be “buy now and pay for it the rest of your life.”

Here’s a newspaper ad dated March 24,1903  published in The Bourbon News, a Paris, Kentucky newspaper.

A. F. Wheeler advertised that you could get “Credit on FURNITURE, Credit on CARPETS, Credit on RUGS, Credit on MATTINGS, Credit on DRAPERIES, Credit on LAMPS, Credit on PICTURES, and Credit on RANGES (stoves.)

I’ve highlighted “Credit On” every place it appears by putting a transparent red rectangle over it in Photoshop. You can see the original ad on the bottom right of the page here:

The message of this ad from 1903 was wake up to the fact that you need credit and you can trust us. (For a history of the credit card, itself, visit History of The Credit Card. [Read more →]

Tim Ramsey (whose blog is My Debt Relief Plan) left a comment on my last post; so I went to check out his site on credit card debt reduction.

There I found a link to a non-profit debt counseling service in the UK. Curious as a cat, I explored its links, read through a dozen FAQ’s and then checked out the user forum.

And that’s where I got hooked.

One snippet after another just grabbed me. Little stories that are probably no longer than one hundred or two hundred words unceremoniously tell tales of reversed fortunes. Their authors are civil and understate their problems, but they come across to me like deer in headlights.

They are stunned, most of them, to find themselves in such a situation of danger.

Coping with mounting credit card debt and giving just a hint of the worry and anxiety that’s plaguing them, these nice people are trying to figure out how to get out of something we each have been encouraged to do for years: get into debt. [Read more →]