Saturday, September 26, 2009

Credit Cards

My generation has financed our short pasts and risked our futures with credit cards and student loans. I am definitely not innocent of this, and it sucks.

We were told that we needed a college education, which turned into a bachelor's degree, which turned into a master's degree. We were told that we would only get jobs if we had theses degrees. As we neared collegiate age we were told that college was expensive, and our parents didn't save enough to pay. We weren't all smart enough to pay our way with scholarships, so most of us got student loans, most of which were from the government that educated us up to college.

And at the college, working for minimum wage or slightly above trying to buy pizza and beer and living off the refund of our student loans, and nice looking lady, someone who looks like our favorite aunt, came up to us in the student union and told us we could get a t-shirt or a free pizza if we just signed up for a credit card. You need a credit card to build your credit, so its a good thing. We'll give you a $3,000 limit, but if you only spend what you can, and pay it off, you'll be okay.

Damn that pizza was good, and $10,000 later with a 15% interest rate, that t-shirt is the nicest thing you own.

Credit is this scary thing that's catching up with us now. We're over-educated and underpaid and were planning on making more with our degree than we were when we started, so those "emergency" credit card purchases would be paid off. And now they don't want to hire us.

There are no jobs, or so it seems. We were told to spend, and now we're told not to. There are no fruits to our labor, because we have no labor.

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