Psycho cards

I usually hate psychological testing. I've hated it for job interviews. But just as I was reading this article about how our credit card debt has grown to over $45bn, I was thinking ...

Maybe we should have psychological testing for holding credit cards?

There are too many psychos out there with a walletful of cards mainly because they got duped by the pretty plastic.

(personally I am pissed off that Westpac's Ignite Card is not receiving applications at the moment because the bright red is so darn catchy!)

And then there are those great rewards schemes that you get suckered in to, where you have to save up about ten thousand points to get the tacky plastic cuckoo clock that they've got on their website.

I was standing inline to find out about a card recently and I heard a lady applying for her card. She wasn't earning a whole lot of money - OK, more than me but that is well below the average wage. (Darn I hate to admit that). She was also spending most of that on mortgage repayments each week.

Then she was also paying off a car.

She also had two other cards.

She was also paying off an appliance.

She admitted she didn't have much saved up.

She had middleish expenditures each week (I did some maths and figured that those expenditures would probably have to be on credit if she really did pay off the car and the house properly.)

How the heck does someone like this actually ever pay off a credit card?

What's more, there are certainly other people who are a lot worse - people who have lots more to pay off and then buy smokes and gamble on credit and then think it's kinda amusing that they go into the red. Hahaha.

Maybe that should be a psychological test - here's a mock bank account. It's yours. You have just gone below 0 balance. Are you laughing?

Anyhow, it all frustrates me how we've got so many whackos out there. Makes you ashamed to be a

person thinking about someday holding a credit card.