Credit Card Company Elimination

Before you get into a situation where you need to consider credit card debt elimination, you should consider "credit card company elimination." If you have more than one credit card and have some decent credit card limits, you need to seriously consider getting rid of all but one of them. Then you need to pledge to yourself that you will pay the balance off every month. I carried an American Express Card for years for this very reason. Now that I am carrying only one card with no balance, I am paying off the balance as I go through my online account. Most online services will let you make payments anytime during the month and as many times as you want to. The faster you get that balance to zero, the less risk you have of having to pay a dime to the credit card company. They make money from your purchases; charging you ridiculous interest rates is icing on the cake for them. As I used credit cards to fund a business, my balances on the cards became quite large. What did the credit card companies do? They pulled my credit report and looked at my debt ratios. They thought they were getting too high, so I received a nice note in the mail informing me that I was now a much higher risk to them. They were going to raise my rate from 7.9% to 19.99%. This was all legal and in the fine print we never read. There is a way to keep the credit card companies from doing this to you. You can effectively freeze your current rate if you agree to shut the account down. You do not have to pay off the balance to close the account. So when this slimy credit card company gave me the 19.99% notice, I simply said, "Close the account." I still had a healthy balance, but my rate did not go up until the prime rate started to climb. That is another story. So if you get a credit card company sending you letters that say they are raising your interest rate because they have reviewed your overall credit and feel that your balances are too high overall, eliminate the credit card company. Close the account. Then try to find other options to pay the balance down. There are ways to get around the traps that these companies set. If you can’t find a way out, you may want to consider credit card debt elimination as an option. I would choose that over bankruptcy.