Seriously in debt? 69 percent due to credit cards.

First of all, try NOT to have more than two credit cards, even if you can afford them. One VISA, one MasterCard and that should be sufficient. My personal thoughts anyway. I have three currently. Need to cancel one soon. There are quite a lot of benefits for credit cards but there are harmful potentials too. Here are some good ways to use your credit card. The Credit Counselling and Debt Management Agency (AKPK) has helped 14,688 individuals fully settle their debts totalling RM593 million via its debt management programme (DMP) as at Sept 30, 2017. This is the full article in NST. In brief, the average owed per person for these 14,688 individuals was over RM40k. They have FULLY SETTLED their debts. Kudos to these people and great job AKPK.
To those who has never been to an AKPK office before, you can drop by to get a print out of your credit score too, for free. It does not need to be due to credit issues okay. The officers are friendly people like you and me as well. AKPK helps borrowers improve their financial standing by restructuring their housing, vehicles and personal loans, including outstanding credit card balances. According to AKPK Chief Executive Officer, Azaddin Ngah Tasir, since AKPK’s inception in 2006, a total of 631,386 individuals had attended the counselling services as of Sept 30, 2017. He added, “Of the total, some 198,915 individuals have enrolled in the programme.” He shared that 68.7 per cent of those enrolled in the DMP were in the 30–50 years age and unable to pay their credit card debts.
He cited poor financial planning as the major reason for the financial difficulty and this constituted 44.7 per cent of the cases received. This was then followed by high cost of living (19.3 per cent), business failure or slowdown (14.8 per cent), high medical expenses (9.3 per cent) and others (11.9 per cent). There are even 14.6 per cent of the individuals below 30 years old who joined the DMP not because of debt problem but because they wanted financial advice. (I think they can also read kopiandproperty.my 😛 )
Sometimes, poor financial planning was caused by insufficient financial awareness. Many times, it’s caused by the easy availability of credit. When it’s easy to get people to lend us money, it’s even easier for us to spend it. Look at the foreign workers who remit so much money back home. They know that it’stough to earn money and thus they saved every bit of it.  I have a friend who worked in Singapore for 9 years. As soon as he came back to Malaysia, he was able to buy property, a car and even open his own pet clinic. He said he does not spend like many others. Well, not everyone could do it which is why if we do not have the credit cards in the first place, there’s no way that we could spend more than we have… Think about it and all the best.
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written on 11 Oct 2017
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