#26 – Not Having A Credit Card, Or, How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Keeping My Money In A Mason Jar Under My Bed.

It’s Christmastime, 1999.

Wait, sorry, that sounds like the beginning of a horrible poem. I meant to say-

It was the season of Christ’s noble birth, in the year one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you this blog isn’t classy.

Anyway, I was 18. I worked at a video store (surprise!). I got the job because I referenced two of the greatest and most opposite films of all time- To Kill A Mockingbird and But I’m A Cheerleader.

ANYWAY. I was 18, I worked at a video store, it was the Xmas season, and I hated everyone. Because everyone is stupid to you when you’re 18 and work in a video store in the mall during the holidays. I learned that in developmental psychology class.

Every person who walked up to the register- and there were literally THOUSANDS as it was, you know, Jesus’ bday- handed me a credit card. I had been thinking for some time about getting an American Express Blue Card, which were completely new at the time. They were so fing sexy; clear with the little blue box in the middle, and a microchip that stored your info for, I don’t know, shopping in the Matrix, or whatever. I knew jack shit about credit cards. I had heard they caused the great depression, and that only poor people carried Discover, but beyond all that, they were free fucking money, and who doesn’t like that shit?

As soon as I told my mother, she did the only thing a mother could do, which was DASH ALL MY HOPES AND DREAMS. She said the rates were too high, and why did I need THAT particular card anyway? She warned me to be careful of debt. I should look at my father and the fucking mire he’d gotten himself into being so horrible with money (that all makes my parents sound like terrible people, but, honestly, my dad’s awesome).

This, and the fact that every single person I sold ANYTHING to between November 20th and December 24th put it on their card, created within me a burning fear of credit cards.

Burning like pubic-lice-when-you-tell-them-their-favourite-show’s-been-canceled burning, not lighting-my-hand-on-fire-and-then-pouring-lye-over-it burning. Just to be clear.

So I passed through college without anything more than a debit card, and I exist now as an adult with only some medical bills on my freecreditreport.com.

My mother… okay, look, she’s probably never going to read this, so I’m just going to say it- what’s her fucking deal? Why is she always trying to ‘teach me important life lessons that stick with me years afterwards’, and ‘doing my laundry’, and ‘making me delicious sandwiches’, and ‘telling me it’s okay if I’m gay, just don’t marry someone who hits you like your Aunt Desiree did’? I mean, seriously, where the fuck does that lady get off?

My mother is constantly telling me how important it is for me to have some semblance of real credit. What if you want to buy a house?, she asks. What if you want to buy a car, or a boat?

Apparently being homeless, staying in one place, and not having fun in the summer is some sort of social faux pas now.

GOD, MOM!

I guess, in a way, one of the reasons I enjoy not having a credit card is it doesn’t prove my mom right.

Every 20-something girl should have at least that.

But the biggest reason is that I never, ever overspend. I can’t. When I try and put even 1 cent over my checking account balance on my bank-issue-standard debit card, it doesn’t go through. For someone like me who considers drunk shopping 1. a fucking sport, and 2. the only way to shop for anything, especially underwear, this is really for the best. It’s a safeguard. I’d be in a basement somewhere with the CEO of Urban Outfitters, the President of Virgin Megastores America, and the guy who makes my sandwiches at Columbus Gourmet slapping and waterboarding me right now if it weren’t for that.

Every cent I spend is completely accounted for, and every nano-cent means something.

Let’s ignore the fact I never have any money, and any time something breaks, rips, or disappears, I have to wait a few months before I can replace it (which is why I currently do not have any pants, or sheets, or furniture). I only have healthy debt, and, of course (but no offense), a raging case of the ‘better than you’-s because of it.

Just because I can never have nice things, or be treated like a normal, functioning adult doesn’t mean I can’t be happy with the current state of my financials. At the end of the day, I am fucking shyte with money, and it would be a risk that would make things far, far worse for me than they are now.

At they very least, not having a credit card shows me where my priorities are: delicious food, thirst-quenching booze, overpriced jewelery, and toys my cats will never play with, no matter what they do. It’s half therapy, half religion.

And it also makes me work hard for things, since the only way I’ll ever be able to own anything I want is to spend extra hours in my scary, saw-filled place o’ work, staring at a computer screen and mentally preparing for a serial killer to clomp up the stairs and gracefully put an axe in the back of my head because I forgot to set the alarm.

So when I look at my video game console holder and get a little sad because there is no XBox 360 there, or when I come home from work and I have to make prison wine because I can’t buy beer or my rent check will bounce, or when my friends wear clothes that they bought sometime after their 16th birthday, I just remind myself of how sweet it’s going to be when I become famous, and Amex will just give me a black credit card and tell me to call their special hotline whenever I need tickets to a Sixers’ game.

Also, how much it probably irks my mom that I’m not accruing any frequent flier miles.