Jean Chatzky Quotes

I lost my computer business when I was 29 because I gave credit to firms I didn't investigate. I lost my house and had to move back in with my parents and then I lived in an office for six months.

I wasn't a financial pro, and I paid the price.

Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.

No nation can miss interest or principle payments without some negative impact on its credit standing.

In this business, if you don't pay your debts you're finished.

Even if you feel like your debt is just never going to go away, think long and hard before declaring bankruptcy. Declaring bankruptcy means that getting a loan for anything will be next to impossible for the next 10 years.

Make this the year you tackle that credit card debt once and for all.

If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your shoes. The biggest penalty you'll face is trouble getting future credit.

Any investment bought via credit always runs the risk of margin calls and, eventually, liquidation.

Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

By the time most people file for bankruptcy, their credit is already trashed, they have a high debt-to-income ratio - a key indicator lenders look at - and they've likely defaulted on more than a few accounts.

It's an open secret that if a debtor is willing to wait long enough, he can probably get away with paying almost nothing, as long as he doesn't mind hurting his credit score.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Who quick be to borrow and slow be to pay, their credit is naught, go they ever so gay.

Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it.

It is a fraud to borrow what we are unable to pay.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

The farmer may often have suffered from excessive interest and grasping creditors; but it was no less frequently the avarice of the lender that got him into trouble than the fact that he was too sanguine and too prone to believe that he could safely go into debt, on the assumption that crops and prices in the future would equal those in the present.

If someone owed you a large amount of money, you probably would make quite a few attempts to get it back. Not the federal government.

One of the greatest disservices you can do a man is to lend him money that he can't pay back.

Whenever you borrow money, the people you borrow it from have leverage over you.

Defaulting on our [national] debt is defaulting on America.

A man needs credit. Especially when he has no money.