Some people will tell you that you should never go into debt.
Others will say that if you are responsible, and don't abuse your credit cards, then it's OK to have a couple.
Then there are those that basically live off of their plastic, just waiting for the inevitable bankruptcy.
We used to be the people in the middle.
We used our cards for big purchases like furniture or appliances.
We would buy something, make payments until it was paid off, and then buy something else.
We were very practical in our spending and never bought anything that we couldn't pay for within six months.
We had just bought our first house, it was a bit of a fixer upper, but it was exciting to see it transform into our perfect dream home.
We had such a fun time spending our weekends at the hardware store picking out colors that we thought would look good on the walls.
It was not cheap to fix up a house, and we didn't have the money that was needed to make it look the way we wanted it.
So we borrowed what we needed from Visa.
After a few years, we had filled our home with a couple of little tykes.
They were the best part of our lives.
We continued to work on the house, and our goal was to eventually get the basement finished.
Although we were still being pretty sensible with our spending, we had slipped a bit.
We were far from what I would call financial distress, but we had built up a nice pile of credit card bills.
Things would have been fine, if my husband had not lost his job.
Of course it was a huge blow to our finances when we lost his paycheck.
Even though he got a new job, it did not pay near as much as his last job.
We started having trouble paying the bills each month.
When you find yourself in financial trouble, and you look to others for help, the first thing they ask you is how much do you have saved up.
This became such a frustrating question, because we had nothing saved up.
Over the years, we just put all of our purchase on our cards.
We didn't know anything about saving money.
We thought we could handle our payments on our own, but soon we had people calling us about late payments.
Soon we knew that we couldn't do it on our own.
My friend suggested that we get some help through a credit counseling service.
She said that it worked for her family and she was making progress in getting out of debt.
So we looked into it and found out that they would work with our creditors and help us come up with a way to make all of our payments.
It was a small miracle for us.
I don't know how else we would have done it.
I was sure that we were going to have to declare bankruptcy.
Now, not only are we on our way out of debt, but we have also started to put some money away.
We have had to change the way we live, and we had to cut up those cards.
We have made a promise that we will never use them again.
We are also teaching our children this valuable lesson so they might avoid the same mistakes we made.