Credit Cards - Who Needs 'em? (Everyone Apparently!)

Hi, and welcome to all of my loyal readers (of whom there will be a limited number, as this is my very first attempt at one of these blog thingies).

I'm intending to use this space for a number of purposes, as the fancy takes me - venting my spleen, sharing my thoughts, attracting your responses or merely arsing about. I may stick a few photos and videos up here from time to time too.

Anyway, enough prevarication, let's get into it. My inaugural comment on the state of the world involves credit cards and their usefulness, or otherwise, in a time of recession.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Brunette (a.k.a. She Who Must Be Adored) and I had our own business. The whereabouts, ins and outs and ups and downs aren’t relevant to this particular story (rest assured, they will crop up in future posts), suffice it to say that the business is now defunct.

During its all too brief existence we managed to max out three credit cards to the tune of tumpty-thousand euro. Since closing down our financial black hole we’ve succeeded in converting the credit into a fixed-term loan and hacking the cards into very, very small pieces. If you've never done this you'll find it hard to imagine the inordinately huge amount of satisfaction to be gleaned from "sticking it to The Man".

However, if you intend to lead a life that can be in any way described as normal, several months later you’ll realise that The Man is not that easily shaken off. For instance, try ordering or booking something - a DVD, a flight, a couple of pounds of Scottish salmon - on the Interweb without a credit card.

We are currently trying to pay for accommodation for a forthcoming overseas trip using a debit card. Not all that difficult you might think. Wrong. Error messages abound and it seems that the money that we haven't actually paid to anyone is not ours anymore, until it is 'repaid' back to our account several days later. No, we don't understand this either.

So, the moral of this tale is that someone, somewhere - the ubiquitous "they" - wants us to keep on using our credit cards in spite of the fact that the overuse of credit got us into this mess in the first place (it's not called the 'Credit Crunch' for nothing).

t.t.f.n.,
oldblodger