For five years, Kerry Ward and her husband, Rich, worked to pay off $36,000 in debt, sending $600 every month to a debt management plan.
When they triumphantly unyoked themselves from their credit cards, the last thing they wanted to do was open another one.
"We talked about it, and we were both kind of like, 'No way,'" said Kerry, a mom of two in Glencoe, Minn., who now buys what she needs with her bank-issued debit card, with a Mastercard logo. "I can shop online. It's really no different, except that we essentially pay cash for everything."
The Wards are part of a new wave of people snipping their credit cards and returning to a cash- and debit-only economy after decades of blockbuster growth in credit card use. Their ranks are rising so swiftly that TransUnion, one of the three major credit reporting agencies, declared it "one of the fastest-growing consumer groups in the country."
In October, the agency released a study of its credit accounts and found that in 2009 more than 70 million Americans had active credit cards. In 2010, that number dropped to 62 million.
"In 2010, there was a huge shift of people going from having credit cards to not having credit cards," says Ezra Becker, the vice president of research at TransUnion, who was the lead researcher on the study.
Some have quit for philosophical reasons -- they don't want to pay high interest rates and want to live as debt-free as possible. Others had their cards yanked because they fell behind on payments or couldn't make them at all.
While TransUnion didn't break down those numbers, Becker said a significant portion of the 8 million former users decided on their own to stop using credit. Like the Wards, many rely on debit cards, which look like credit cards but are essentially electronic checks that take money immediately and directly from an account.