Disclosure: This post is brought to you by Sales Sense Payments. The opinions shared here are 100% mine.

My first credit card was a “gift” from my dad. When I graduated from high school and was headed out of state for college, he thought I needed a credit card. Unfortunately it wasn’t made clear to me that I would be paying that bill. The minimum payment was all I could manage so I didn’t pay more than that. For me, it was a convenient and mindless way to meet expenses of living away from home. When I got out of college, my husband and I foolishly depended on credit cards to supplement our income for many years. In those early years, there were a few times that paying the bill wasn’t high on my priority list. Ouch….getting slammed with fees for missing a payment due date was a painful lesson to learn.

It seems that we are in good company. According to the infographic below, credit cards are used worldwide on a near constant basis. It’s probably no surprise to you that most Americans carry multiple cards in their wallets. I’m sure that at least a few of those 609.8 million credit card bills didn’t get paid on time. So in addition to the balance they carry, those cards added a few late fees to the bill. Double ouch. With the credit cards stacking up to 288 miles high, I wonder how tall the bills would stack up if placed one on top of another?

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I’m happy to say that my family is not one of these statistics…..anymore. We use a scheduled billing system to make sure our payment makes it on time. We also pay more than the minimum payment to snowball our debt. We want to avoid having credit card debt on our shoulders. We don’t think credit cards are evil or anything. It’s just that our family gets in above our heads when we use credit cards. We’ve proved that hypothesis time and again, so there’s no need to dangle the carrot in front of our budget anymore.

While we do carry a balance on more than one card at the moment, we’re finally working hard to pay off those balances and — more importantly — KEEP the balances off. To help us meet that goal, we’re not carrying our credit cards in our wallets. Instead, we keep the cards at home so we can only use them in a true emergency. At last, we’re living below our means. We’re determined to pay cash for items whenever possible. As our cards are paid off, we’re closing out the accounts. While I’ve read that doing so might negatively impact our credit score, we feel that it’s too great a temptation to have those cards available. We don’t want to resort to using the cards and living beyond our means. So for our family, we’re doing our part to make that credit card tower smaller…one card at a time.

I was compensated for this post. The opinions shared here are 100% mine.