Some financial facts to consider as the 2003 holiday shopping season comes to a close:

• Americans spent just over $115 billion on credit cards and debit cards over the 2003 holiday shopping season - $88.4 billion on credit cards and $26.7 billion on debit cards. (Source: www.cardweb.com)
• Eighty percent of all households have at least one credit card. With well over one billion cards in circulation, the average household has about a dozen credit cards. About 60% of cardholders carry credit card debt from month to month. The average credit card debt for households that carry a balance is more than $10,000. (Source: Consumer Federation of America)
• The term 'bankruptcy' comes from the word bankarotta, meaning 'broken bench'.

And here is what others have to say about money ...

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"They say money talks, but the only thing it ever said to me was good-bye."

-- Joe Louis

"I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by four o'clock this afternoon."

-- Henny Youngman

"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody."

-- Adlai Stevenson

"About the time we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends."

-- Herbert Hoover

"'Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like."

-- Will Rogers

"If you think nobody cares whether you are alive or dead, try missing a couple of car payments."

-- Ann Landers

"Money often costs too much."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"Creditors have better memories than debtors."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain."

-- Robert Frost