with us to talk about that is gerri detweiler. she's director of consumer education at credit.com. erri, welcome. > > thank you. > what happened? > > there is a lot of frugal fatigue out there. we have been so careful with our spending for the past few years i think some consumers said "i deserve to buy myself something, not just other people gifts this year." so what we are seeing is, before the holidays, fico did a survey where they found that a slightly increased number of people said they would take three months or more to pay off their credit card debt that they plan to run up before the holidays. of course, now we have to see exactly what the numbers were after the holidays. but, generally i think that consumers are a little bit more optimistic with their spending this year. > why did this happen? we have been trained not to use our credit cards as much, not to max them out. why did this reverse itself? why do people feel so confident? > > we have seen a couple of trends when it comes to credit cards: we do see a lot of consumers who are using their credit cards to max out rew