Are you worried about the future likelihood of not being able to pay your credit card debt?

Are you getting behind in your credit card debt payments? Have you incurred late-payment penalty fees, higher interest rates, and increased monthly minimum payment amounts?

Like others in that situation, have you started thinking about bankruptcy?

Joblessness, a major health crisis, a failed enterprise, a family death, or financial mismanagement could have cleaned out your savings. Whatever the reason is for your credit card debt problems, you can escape the negative assumptions and harsh thinking about bankruptcy or impatient, aggressive debt collectors with some basic education about unsecured credit card debt.

According to the Credit Card Debt Survival Guide, it is important to understand the realities of credit card debt collection. If your account is in arrears, it is one of millions of accounts in arrears. In the last 12 months, eight percent of American adults (18 million people) have been late making a credit card payment and have missed a payment entirely, according to creditcards.com. If you account is sold to a junk debt buyer, it is one of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands sold in a package of junk debt for ten cents on the dollar or less.

The Federal Reserve requires the credit card companies to budget for bad debt. They assume those bad-debt consumers cannot pay for any number of reasons, and sell the credit card accounts after they write them off. Credit card debt collectors who end up with those credit card accounts view consumers in one of two ways, according to the Credit Card Debt Survival Guide; there are those who resist their collection efforts and those who do not resist them.

Your safety and security are in the numbers, in the millions of charged-off accounts and in the pennies per dollar each is actually worth. If you resist debt collection attempts (after you learn how to properly do so), it is simply not profitable for a debt collector to put more time into chasing you, when they can put that time in getting the easy returns from the many other people who put up no resistance. Credit card debt collectors can make a lot of money, if they only collect from 50 percent of the delinquent accounts assigned to them.

Understanding how to use the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, your state’s consumer protection laws and, if necessary, your local court’s rules of civil procedure are the first steps to frustrating credit card debt collectors.