There is sometimes a sense of panic that sets in when you see your credit card bills begin to spiral out of control. When you are fairly new to that sense of being trapped by credit, you may turn to a second mortgage. But then if the credit card bills continue to grow and grow, as they are designed to do, you suddenly realize you have put your home on the line and it might now be in danger if you default on those bills.

This is when that mountain of debt can begin to knock on the door of your last remaining resources to try to fight back and you have to make some important decisions. And one is whether it would be a good idea to cash in your retirement money or borrow on your 401K to get enough money to try to bring down your debt levels. So deciding whether this is a good idea is a huge gamble because if you win, you could eliminate debt entirely. But if you lose, there goes your protection for your senior years and maybe the little nest egg you wanted to pass along to the kids as an inheritance.

The credit card business is one of the most competitive industries there is. You can tell that because you no doubt get dozens of invitations for new credit cards every week. That is because the only way a credit card company can continue to grow new business is to steal the business away from another credit card company. It isn’t really a business where there are a lot of new customers coming into the market. The types of accounts the credit card companies want are people who are carrying a lot of debt, who continue to pay on the debt but never pay it off and who have no history of defaulting on their loans. If that describes you, then you are on the A list for a potential customer for a credit card company.

If you have a lot of credit card debt, it really isn’t that flattering that other credit card companies want your business. Even more infuriating is when a credit card company who already has you in debt sends you offers for still more credit cards. But there may be a glimmer of light in this tough situation. You might be able to leverage you’re “A list” position with the credit world to find a way to manage your credit card debt more successfully.

In most families, there is one person whose job it is to take care of the family budget. It usually is dad or mom and it is that adult’s job to make sure all the bills are paid and that the family budget is healthy so the family can afford the good things everyone needs to live a comfortable life. This is an important job because no family can continue to function without a viable and realistic budget. Many have said that if a lot of companies or even our country were to be run with the same sense of reality and making the books balance that the average mom uses, we would all be better off.

The only problem with this system is sometimes its easy to look at the family budget as “mom’s problem” or the problem of whoever it is that takes care of paying the bills. So when a serious problem comes up like an explosion of credit card bills, mom can get pretty overwhelmed especially if there is no way to curb credit card spending so there can always be enough on hand to pay those bills off.

The challenge of tackling a massive credit card debt can seem almost impossible at times. When you look at the many bills rushing in each month and then you start going through that credit card bill, the idea of actually starting to pay that bill down can be overwhelming. And part of the reason that uphill battle to win over debt seems so hard is those almost ridiculously high interest rates credit card companies are allowed to charge.

If you have a credit card debt in the thousands of dollars and that interest rate can get above 15%, that is going to mean that a large portion of your monthly payment is going to go toward the interest. And what that means is that your balance will go down slowly which is very discouraging especially if you are also using the credit card so your balance continues to go up and up and up.

When a marriage comes to an end, it’s always a tragedy. Of course the rending of the family unit and the difficulty for the kids is the hardest thing about separating at divorce. But the difficulty of separating one house into two can be difficult and tedious to say the least. You have to go from one checking account to two, two homes instead of one and separate accounts for everything from credit cards to utilities.

The is an additional overhead to how to handle a divorce situation if in addition to splitting your assets, credit card debt that may have been a part of the shared family financial picture also must be split up. To the credit card company, that family credit card is the property of that shared entity which was the marriage. So when the union splits up, the transition from a financial point of view of your accounts separating is not over night.