Australia's first credit card appeared in 1974. Bankcard caused a plastic revolution. Suddenly huge numbers of people were offered an ongoing personal loan with a heady credit limit of $400!

Did you know there are now over 10 million credit cards in Australia?    

Credit card debt in Australia now tops $37 billion. Average credit card limits have almost doubled in 5 years to $6,400.   

Extreme cases of credit card debt is leading to more than 4000 people being declared bankrupt every year. Half of them are under 35 years of age.  

Card skimming is currently costing Australia approximately $100 million dollars a year. It now represents over 50% of credit card fraud up from only 5% 2-3 years ago. What is skimming? Skimming is when credit or debit cards are skimmed of the information on the magnetic strip using a small device and then used fraudulently.

Credit cards are designed deliberately with a very small monthly payment. The reason is so you will never pay them off! The lenders want you to pay interest for as long as possible.

The average credit card would take a minimum of 15 years to pay off, if you only made the minimum payments.

How profitable are credit cards for the issuer? Try this; using a search engine key in ""credit card"". The 1st ten pages  almost exclusively advertise different credit cards. This means about 80 different cards alone and there is more as you scroll further into the search engines data base.

A credit card user is a borrower.