Read the fine print

I was reading the Terms and Conditions for a regional bank that recently bought up a local bank, and I was struck by the blatantly hostile tone throughout the whole mess of legalese. Their terms, needless to say, are extremely unfavorable, from a potential customer's point of view.

The tone of their big pictures-low text sales piece was completely the opposite:  "Happy Happy Friendly Bank, Happy Happy Sunshine You:  Happy."

It took me a bit to figure out that both of these tones were completely intentional. The Terms and Conditions are hostile on purpose; they are meant to drive away potential banking customers:  the ones who can read, and do math, and plan ahead for any length of time longer than two minutes.

The customers that they want are the people who will only glance at the fluff sales literature, and never read the Terms and Conditions of how their accounts can and will be pillaged.  "Pillaged" is not too strong a word here...it was that bad.  This bank is going to take their hard-earned money and use it to gobble up some more small banks...then rinse and repeat.

Jesus, remember me in your Kingdom.

While thinking about this, I randomly found Isaiah chapter 17, where God promises that plunderers will themselves be plundered. Immediately after reading that, I randomly opened my Bible to Jeremiah chapter 30, where God says basically the same thing (but to a different prophet at a different time in history). The message here seems clear:  Justice is coming.

 

The value of good information

While wandering around the internet, I stumbled upon a brief list of foods that can be migraine triggers. My husband knew most of his food-related triggers, but this list had several that we had not heard about before. This new information will likely spare him several headaches a month.

I've been slowly reading through Will Durant's The Story of Civilization series. It is helping me put the history that I've largely learned piecewise into a much more coherent whole. It has also made me much more wary of historical examples used in rhetoric...it is very easy to cherry-pick a bit of history to make your point, while ignoring whole heaps of counterexamples, not to mention the broader trends and forces that have played out over time.

I've also been stretching my learning through crossword puzzles; hard ones that force me to resort to the atlas frequently. This has exposed a number of gaps and inaccuracies in my geographic knowledge; Somalia is not directly to the west of Egypt.

For my own amusement, I calculated the percentage of our gross income that goes to health insurance premiums. At present it is large but sustainable; history has shown that the peasantry will generally tolerate incredible impositions before resorting to revolt. But next winter, we may be left with a choice between health insurance and heat, and I know which way we will vote with our dollars. It has been obvious to me (though somehow not to the Supreme Court) that Obamacare was never designed to work in the long term, but to function as a stepping-stone to single-payer health insurance. Therefore I have been waiting patiently for it to fail, and I fully expect that it will be replaced with something even worse.

The liberal strategy of "let's bring the gays out of the closet, and then we'll shove the conservative Christians in" has also been apparent to me for a long time, so the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision was no surprise.

Not being able to do much about those issues, I have been doing what I can at home to make the world a better place: weeding, hanging up a few more decorations on the walls, restocking the pantry. And also looking forward to the world to come...what can I do now that will stand the test of fire??

What really happens when you fall off the radar

We've been debt-free for several years now. Of the three credit reporting agencies, one can't even get my name right, another hasn't been able to keep up with my current address, and the third seems to have chosen to forget that I even exist. (As if it's so hard for a company built around gathering and storing information en masse to keep one more handful of bytes of data around.)

Meanwhile, I see more and more and more articles about how it is absolutely necessary to have a good, long credit record and a high credit score, and how not having those things must mean that you are a very, very bad person.  (Who may not even deserve to get their mandated Obamacare.)

Let's spit this propaganda out and step back for a minute:  Who created credit reporting and scoring? Creditors, so they can tell who will be most profitable for them to lend to. Who is it most profitable for them to lend to? People who routinely use credit, and who might someday have to live off credit for a while. (Creditors take a little in interest and fees off the top in the good economic times, and will take much more than that in the hard and desperate times.) Who is the least profitable for them? Two types:  people who run up huge piles of debt and then never repay, either intentionally or unintentionally, and people who rarely or never use credit.

So there is more than one way to get a lower credit score, and having one does not necessarily imply immoral or irresponsible behavior.
 
The Bible is clear:  debt is to be avoided, but the poor cannot always avoid do this, and will sometimes get into debt beyond any possibility of repayment. There should be a mechanism to erase their debt and allow them to start over with a clean slate--this is laid out in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, containing the Law that was given to the Israelites), and it is the origin of our modern bankruptcy laws. The rich who exploit the hardships of the poor to enrich themselves even further are thoroughly condemned throughout the Bible. One reason for the periodic remission of debts is to prevent the economic winners from actually taking all and permanently enslaving their countrymen.

Today, powerful corporations and their allies in media and government and academia would like you to believe that living debt-free is impossible. But debt is slavery, your enslavement is to their profit, not yours, and they are even ready to deny an honest living to those whom they can't enslave. Who is it who really determines what is possible and what isn't? God and only God. Look around you:  there are millions of people surviving and getting by who don't have "good credit", who don't have credit cards, and who don't have much of an income. A fair number of these people are even living quite well. It is not impossible if there are people who are actually doing it.

Beyond this, when God provides supernaturally it is utterly beyond the understanding of those who are merely of this world. It is this Providence that I have come to depend on more and more. The best way to make "something from almost nothing" is to follow the One who made absolutely everything from absolutely nothing, and who can always provide that little something to get you started.