"Everyone's got a balance"

Look round. Your friends, your colleagues, your sister. Everyone's carrying something. A card with a balance is what an adult's wallet looks like, and a book that treats it as a problem is treating normal life as a problem.

StepChange says around eighteen million people in the UK have credit card debt. So yes, it's common. It's roughly a third of adults, on that figure, and if you're one of them you're not unusual and you shouldn't feel that you are. The book isn't about being unusual. It's about whether the common thing is costing you, and common things do.

Normal isn't the same as free. Eighteen million people carrying a balance is eighteen million people paying interest on coats, and the fact that they're all doing it doesn't lower anyone's rate. It just means that the cost is spread so widely that nobody remarks on it, the way nobody remarks on a tax that everyone pays. An earlier book in this series is about spending to keep up with the people around you, and the card is where a lot of that spending goes, and a table full of people with balances is a table where nobody asks what the evening costs, because the card will get it and the statement's a month away.

There's also a question about which normal you're in. Among the people you know, some carry a balance and some don't, and you can't tell which from the outside, because the ones who clear it monthly don't announce it and the ones who don't, don't either. The colleague who seems to have the same life as you may be at zero, using the card for the points and paying it off on the twenty-eighth, and the difference between the two of you isn't income. It's whether the card lives in a wallet or a drawer.

So everyone's got a balance in the sense that many people have, and that's true and doesn't help. The question isn't whether you're normal. It's what the normal is costing, and chapter 17 adds it up.