Thanks for sharing, Charles, I hope your trek towards financial stability goes well.

I will recommend Dave Ramsey to you, he has a couple books out I guess, I read one once. It was very useful. Check it out at the local library. Buying a book on becoming debt free just never seemed to make any sense to me.

That's great that you're reading books in their entirety. Seriously, though, a lot of people want to be debt free and don't know how to do it, and that will teach you how. Of course, you don't have to read the whole thing - just read the next step, and then do it, then read the step after that.

Will look into it. Thanks for the suggestion. I am currently reading Bernard Goldberg's Crazies to the left of me, wimps to the right and have Bill O'Reilly's Culture Warrior on stand by. These would be my first books ever that I would have read in their entireties.

I'm not MM, but I'll tell you it's a perfectly awful idea, and here's why.

Most credit cards won't charge you interest if you pay off the entire balance each month, so that really doesn't come in to play in the above scenario--IF you never, EVER, let a balance carry over.

With your track record, and your tendency to succumb to tempation, how long would it be before you start leaving a little balance here, a little balance there..."I can get chinese food if I only pay $60 on the electric bill instead of $79, what's $19 bucks? I can make that up next month."

It's too easy to get behind, too tempting to let those balances ride and spend the cash on something else, and sooner or later you find yourself in DEBT over everyday recurring expenses! Trust me, the odds always favor the house, the credit card companies are COUNTING on this, and it's so common that the various 'rewards' they offer don't end up costing them a dime because all they REALLY do is encourage you to rack up increasing amounts of debt.

For someone just starting to clean up their credit (like yourself) one very practical thing you can do is view your own credit report regularly. Sign up for one of those monitoring services, and make sure you get one that includes your FICO score. I use this one WWW Linkand it's the best $13.00 I spend every month.

This allows you to keep an eye on things, and contains excellent information in regards to finding old creditors so you can pay them off and get these collections removed from your report. Sometimes you can even negotiate a partial payment that will satisfy the debt if it's *really* old.

It's also got a 'scenario generator' which allows you to play the 'what if?' game with your finances to see how various actions will affect your credit score, ie: "What if I pay off this or that debt" or "What if I just make all my payments on time for the next year?" This will help you identify the most positive actions you can take at any given time and help you set goals.

Avoid temptation! If you start recieving 'prescreened' or 'preapproved' credit card offers, or catalogues with a pre-approved spending limit, destroy them immediately (use a shredder) and add your name to the Opt-out lists so you don't recieve these offers in the future.WWW Link

These offers are never very good, their interest rates are astronomical and so are their yearly/monthly fees. Haha, I got one offer for a credit card with a $200 limit on it, but the one-time 'processing fee' was something like $99 and the yearly fee was $79.00 and then there was a montly service charge of about $6.00, all at the low, low rate of 24.99% APR! I almost framed that sucker, it was such a bad offer.

Stay away from crap like this, destroy it before opening! The most attractive cards don't need to send out mass mailers to bad credit risks, and any company that does is going to cause you more trouble than that little bit of credit is worth.

Good luck on turning it all around. Be patient, it may take years, but I promise you'll find the struggle worth it in the long run.