Carrying Plastic

As teens go through leaps and bounds towards "freedom," (or at least being an adult, as it is in question how free they actually are), one of the big steps along the way is that first bank account equipped with a magical plastic card that let's you buy things without money. Well, not exactly, but it can seem that way. Credit or debit cards can be unbelievably handy, in a few ways. They eliminate that agonizing choice of how much money to carry in the wallet, always trying to balance between having enough to spend and having too much, making you either a spendthrift or paranoid about losing it. With the card, you carry all your money with you, but if disaster does strike, all those caboodles of cash are not instantly gone. With any luck and a phone call or too, you can get another card and get right back to swiping it. It probably also saves you money in the long run. All those countless pennies and dimes that jingle in your pocket, get deposited somewhere and mysteriously disappear now stay safely in your bank account. After maybe 5 purchases, that could be a whole candy bar you're saving. The problem is that it is all to easy to use a card. You don't feel the physical sense of loss as you hand over a wad of cash, and you aren't shocked back to your senses when you open up a sad, empty wallet. Instead, you can blissfully spend all that hard earned dough in a free-fall of careless generosity towards yourself until you suddenly hit the ground with the earth-jarring realization that you just blew your whole stash of cash. So credit cards are really just like anything else: the better it feels or seems the worse it is for you.