Does it ever seem like credit card companies seem to treat their customers like indentured slaves? The policies that these credit companies use to handle your accounts are at best unscrupulous and at worst, down right outrageous and robbery. If any other industry tried to cheat their customers out of money like the credit card companies successfully do every day of the year, they would be investigated and jailed with a vengeance. But our government doesn’t do that so the credit card companies literally have a license to steal.

The way these companies handle your accounts has a lot to do with why your credit card debt is so hard to get rid of. When you owe a few thousand dollars to a credit card company and they are constantly slapping you with fees, jack up your interest rates and adding charges to your account for “membership dues” and bogus things like this, it becomes clear that in addition to the debt, the debt carriers are the enemy, not your friend in trying to get your debt down.

There is another level to what should be the purely financial problem of how to handle your credit card debt. That side has to do with the human toll that carrying that debt from month to month and year to year can have on a person and on a family. A family’s finances are at the core of what make the family work. The old joke goes “Money can’t buy happiness but it can rent it.” And while that’s cute, money and debt can make the difference between a family that is able to live peacefully within its means and one that is on the verge of disaster.

So when you sit down and decide that its time you took seriously the challenge of conquering your credit card debt, you have some battles to fight that are not just about interest rates and minimum payments. The truth is that none of us can face down something as overwhelming as a massive credit card debt if we just don’t think we can do it.

The desire to climb out of credit card debt is universal for anyone who is fighting this big problem. And it isn’t an isolated problem. More and more people are having big problems with credit debt especially in these times when you just about have to use credit every day.

There is something a little strange then about credit card companies coming in with offers to help you climb out of credit card debt when its they that are the problem in the first place. It’s almost like a drug pusher pushing a new drug that can get you off drugs but the drug he is pushing is just as addictive as the last one. But when you get offers for new credit cards each month, they often are pushing plans to help you get out of debt by going into debt to them.

When the economy or personal issues and problems result in a high credit card debt, we often find our debt spread over three or four or more cards. So you may have a Visa, several MasterCards, a Discover card and a Capital One card and maybe many more each carrying several thousands of dollars of debt. The result is an ugly parade of bills from each company each needing a minimum payment that pays the interest and takes just a small amount off of your debt.

If it seems that the debt mountain never seems to go down, that’s not an illusion. The situation is not designed to help you get that debt down. It’s a cruel mixed message the credit industry sends us because if you have high credit card debt, your credit rating goes down. But even if you have too much debt, the credit card companies just keep raising your credit ceiling and sending more and more credit card offers to lure you into more debt.