Credit Cards Online Information

For much of my adult life I was burdened with having poor credit. Falling into debt felt nightmarish line ghost of past bad choices always trailing behind me, Not even breaking up with a boyfriend left me as depressed as I was for the five years after I ruined my credit. I learned line hind way that playing fast and loose with money is dangerous, not just financially but also emotionally.

As alone as I felt at the time, I've since discovered that many Black women from all backgrounds have suffered from bad credit at one time or another. This is true for other races and ethnicities, but there are reasons that we in particular fall prey to this. "Black women don't meet the criteria of being the so-called right gender and race. To compensate, many of us try to bolster our sense of identity and self-worth by buying things that somehow give us a sense of worth and self-esteem," says Linda James Myers, a psychology and African-American studies professor at Ohio State University in Columbus "The key is to reverse the faulty formula that has us trying to define our worth by external criteria like how we look and what kind of car we drive."

A Family Affair

When I began to examine my behavior, I realized that most of my family members struggled with credit issues, too. I remember sitting around the dinner table during holidays, laughing hysterically at a relative's dramatic tale of how he or she had cursed out some annoying creditor calling for a payment. In my young mind, paying bills on time was not nearly as much fun as not paying them.

Still I got off to a great financial start. I juggled five credit cards in college and always paid the entire balance on time each month. Because I had part-time jobs and made good money, that was fairly easy to do. Besides, I was very conservative in my spending then. It wasn't until I graduated in 1994 that things went wrong. I was malting a pitiful salary as a paralegal--a job I hated. Buying expensive clothes and shoes made me feel better when I couldn't figure out how to move forward professionally. Most months, I'd spend about $1,000 on clothes--while earning only $300 a week.

# posted by Medical Information : 5:09 AM