As soon as Josué Henriquez turned 18, he applied for a credit card. He wanted to start building his credit so he could one day finance the purchase of a car or home.
“I was told it was the only way I could start my credit in this country,” he says, having relocated to the US from El Salvador as a child.
His credit card limit was low at just $500, with a requirement to keep $250 in a savings account at all times. But over the next decade, as more offers rolled in, both his credit limits and balances ratcheted up. Henriquez’s credit card bills ballooned to over $25,000, and he eventually sought out a debt settlement company for help.
“I had five credit cards at the time. Now I only have two,” he tells me. The rest were shut down as part of his debt management plan, which ravaged his credit report. Now 33, the San Francisco resident eventually got his high-interest debt down to zero by following a four-year payment plan.
Many of us are headed in the opposite direction.
Credit card debt in America continues to break records. After a brief payoff period during COVID-19 lockdown powered mainly by stimulus checks, our collective overall credit card bill became a 13-digit number last year, and now sits at $1.14 trillion according to the most recent Household Debt and Credit report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Consumers typically make larger credit card payments in the first quarter, but both this year and last year the…
