Credit Card Pet Mart
Credit doesn’t always come cheap.

Credit cards might seem like magic. I mean, you just whip out a little plastic rectangle and tickets to the tropics are yours. But don’t be fooled. When you use a credit card, the credit card company lends you money that they expect you to pay back. So buying that DVD player with a credit card today means you’ll have to pay that debt back later. Plus, the company will charge you extra — sometimes a lot extra — if you take a long time to pay them back. The longer it takes you to repay, the more interest, or additional charges, you’ll have to pay.

Hunter was here shopping the other day and didn’t have enough cash for a $250 treadmill for Pumpkin, his overweight hedgehog. So, he used his GreenEx card to pay for the treadmill. A few weeks later, the credit card company sent Hunter a bill for the $250 he had borrowed. But he could only afford to pay $10. So the next month, he was charged $243.60 — the remaining $240, plus $3.60 interest. Again, he could only afford to pay $10 of his bill that month. For many months, he paid $10 on each bill and his interest kept growing. When he finally repaid everything, two years and six months after buying the treadmill, he had paid a total of $309.75 — the original $250, plus $59.75 in interest!