Credit

Living on credit. Credit cards. Credit trap. What’s your credit score? Credit limit? Credit card balance. Credit account. Huh? Oh, I got a little carried away. . . but did I? If you’ve been alive for at least seven years, you have heard at least one of these phrases. Heck some children may even have credit cards. This blog message is one that I’ll call a “short-take” meaning I’ll only take a short minute to speak my thoughts. It’s not written like prose or poetry, but still it is shared to make us think about . . . credit. J

I no longer have a credit card for whatever reasons, be that as it may. And the more I read about credit and credit cards I am sooooo glad I don’t have one. I just read in an issue of Reader’s Digest that if you have a credit card with no balance, and you don’t use it for 12 months, this of course does not make the credit card company happy. So they’ve created rules and laws to their benefit to make you pay just for carrying their piece of plastic in your wallet. They will charge you an annual fee up front and there’s nothing you can do about it except pay it, cut up the card and cancel the account. Not using the card does not automatically mean it is a dead dog. It is only sleeping mind you, and because the credit card company gets hungry, it will “kick your dog” and wake him up and demand that you feed him some Annual fee by Purina, or some other dog food company. Hmmmm. With real beef too!!

I thought this was going to be a short-take but already I’ve written more than I intended to so let’s just jump write in. Oh I mean right in. Just a warning though, for this short-take there is more reason than rhyme to what I’ve written so please just hang in there ‘til the ride is over. And then jump off. Thanks!

In the field of accounting, credit, or “to credit” means to deduct an amount from an account whether in your favor (what you owe to a creditor for instance) or in their favor (from your nest egg. Hmmm.). By the way, to debit means to add to your account, or in layman’s and laywoman’s terms “a deposit”. Now that sounds like paper music to my ears!

Living on credit: Spending resources you see with your eyes (hopes, desires, needs or greeds) only. It’s not yet yours. Has not yet landed onto the landing strip of your hands.

Living on credit: Thinking and dwelling with a futuristic view and mentality (can you say “impatience”, or “are we there yet?”) to the point that when the present arrives you never meet him, her, or it, etc., because you never saw them; because you don’t recognize the day of your visitation. But yet somehow you find yourself sitting in, with and on a mountain of “debt”, that you never saw coming. What a paradox.

Living on credit: Back to the future where time just passes through my fingers. My how time flies. Like the wind. Never late, never early. Always on time. (Can you say “credit card payment due date?” Don’t be late!!)

Living on credit: Borrowing against something you will never own. Whoever created credit may be rich now and at everyone else’s expense, but he (or she) is not your friend. But of course, no one is forcing us to go plastic, but because we have, and have just jumped overboard with it, we’re on a slippery slope of our own making sliding into a “cashless” society where no one will be in control of his or her own . . . Money? What’s that?

There really is no reward to living on credit. It's not like getting extra credit in school for doing extra work. Come on my fellow froggers, I mean bloggers, let's wake up and jump out of the pot before we get boiled to death! Trying to live in tomorrow today leaves nothing for tomorrow when it becomes today. Can you say “where’s my social security?” What’s that?

Peace.