Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. You open the banking app and the number you look at is the one in green, the available credit, and it says twelve hundred and forty pounds, and that feels like money. The number under it, the balance, says three thousand seven hundred and sixty, and that feels like a fact about the card rather than about you. The minimum goes out each month. You're never at zero. You're not in trouble. You just live a little way up a limit, and have for years, and the limit has become the thing that tells you what you can afford.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. The card smooths the month, it's there for emergencies, the interest is small each time you look, and everyone you know has a balance. The second is that the limit isn't yours. It's the bank's estimate of what it can lend you at a profit, and the gap between your balance and the limit isn't money you have. It's money you'll owe, with interest, and it's been arranged to feel like the other thing. A card weakens the feeling of paying and hides the total. The minimum on the statement pulls what you pay down toward it, and people who pay it for long enough are described by the regulator as being in persistent debt. And a card at its limit is no emergency fund at all. The third is practical. You put the card away, physically and in the app, you pay a fixed amount above the minimum on payday, dearest card first, and you spend what's in the account. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to cut up the card, to think borrowing is wrong, or to buy any product. It asks you to stop treating a lending decision made about you as a description of what you own.

Two cautions, and I'd ask you to read them.

If you're missing payments, or paying one card with another, or the balance has been rising for a year and you can't see how it stops, or you're lying awake over it, then this is a book about a habit and you may need something faster than a habit book. StepChange, Citizens Advice and National Debtline are free, confidential, and used to exactly this, and the right time to ring is this week. Read on after you've rung.

And if the debt has become a low mood that's been with you most of the day for a fortnight, or nothing has felt good for that long, that's a change in your health as well as your finances. See a GP.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.