Learning From Your Mistakes

Many people learn from their mistakes, but some people repeat the same mistakes multiple times. Reading about compulsive spending made me wonder about an acquaintance of the sort who shares more information than I need. She worked two jobs and had taken out a loan to pay off her credit card. Racked it up again, lather, rinse, repeat.

At one point she took out a quite hefty loan from a sibling who was single and had extra cash and was put on a payment plan. Her lender's idea was that all the credit cards needed to be paid off and canceled. The deal was brokered by another sibling who thought that was absurd and this poor girl needed a major credit card and a popular store card to get by. She had been advised to declare bankruptcy as an alternative to taking out yet another loan, but chose not to.

Keeping the cards was a huge mistake because she added to the stash. The last update I had was several years ago, at a time she had opened several more major credit cards, some of which had variable interest rates; she had also added to her store cards, including a gas card and two or three more store cards, which always have high interest rates.

I'm no longer in contact with this woman, but I wonder how her debt is doing; with her track record I would be quite surprised if she had cleaned up her debt. Her house of cards was quite shaky, last I knew, and that was when the economy was better. I hope for her sake that she was able to give up the cards, one by one. Starting with those variable rate cards. Those things are frightening!