The Most Important Thing You Can Do

The single most important thing you can do to get your finances in order is to pay off your credit card debt, in toto, ASAP! And never charge more on a card than you can pay off in the thirty-day grace period following the billing date. Use your credit cards this way and they will work for you. Allow the debt to mount and you're one only step removed from the sharks. No one will come along and break your knees -- or put you in debtors' prison (see Dickens's Bleak House) but --

Charles Dickens

but they will take away your house, your Subaru, your Ella Fitzgerald record collection, your self-respect -- everything except the two-way television set that will be mandatory in every household just as Eric Blair predicted!