change? spare change, maybe.

The last time i attended a job fair was a few years ago in NYC at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The crowd was so large It looked like a major recording artist was personally handing out concert tickets to four times what the house could actually seat. Eventually, they had to shut the fair down hours early because of the massive swarm of job-seekers. Those who couldn't get in we're instructed to leave their resumes in marked boxes by, what was now, the closed doors of the convention center halls. No doubt these "in boxes" became trash boxes when it was all said and done. There were simply too many people looking for work. What else is new?

My father is 83 years old with a recent history of medical intervention, and a long history of complications due to diabetes. I picked up his latest round of prescription meds recently to discover that five (FIVE!!!!!) of his prescrips ran him up for almost $400. And like most of this nation's elderly, he's living off savings and a severely battered and constant politically jeopardized social security system. Not to forget that his s.s. payments are as "trickle-down" as it gets, and if he could still work, his paycheck would kill his s.s. payments if he earned more than he got back from the government based on what he earned for himself back in the day, anyway.

My brother is pretty successful right now, but he has zero money management skills, and keeps repeating that I need a credit card as some sort of fix for my own broke ass problems.
I tell him constantly that credit is the last thing I need. The credit companies and the banks are our worst enemies right now. The only way they make money is by keeping the rest of us broke!
As incredible as it sounds, its true.
If you get money from a loan shark, it doesn't matter if you pay them back in full or infrequently. They will hound you and use you for their own ends until you drop. They will claim entitlement for their methods, and it doesn't matter how much you borrowed or paid back. You would be lucky to get out alive, even if you don't get your extremities broken in the process.
The banks, credit companies, and the so-called consolidators work the same way. They may not break your actual legs, but they'll sure break your financial ones.

Banks use a credit agency known as ChexSystems to see if "it's safe" to allow you or I to have a bank account. If you have had an overdraft of any amount in the past for any reason, and it had been overlooked for simply unpaid, this will stick out like a tumor on your record. And you are blacklisted for at least five years, simple as that. You must wait out the mark on your head to get out from under it. If you've ever tried to live and collect your paychecks to pay your bills and get on with life, imagine how hard this becomes when you cannot even get your paychecks CASHED!!!

If you live in a place where you there's no other entity to help you in that matter(and charge you a hefty surcharge on top of it), no check cashing businesses, not even a liquor store to do this, and if they do exist they still have rules on what kind of checks they do cash.
This happened to me in "the big city", I was working my dream job as a broadcast engineer helping construct the studios & broadcast centers for major television networks and bringing home the best pay I've ever seen, plus overtime. (Yes!! UNION RULES!!!)
But because I had a $20 overdraft at a bank 4000 miles away, no bank would see me... or help me fix the problem.
So there I was, broke but not broke. I had a $2200.00 paycheck burning a hole through my pocket with white hot intensity, and I had no place to put it. Check cashing stores couldn't help simply because the check was too large, and if they had they would've taken at least a $150 cut.

By contrast, the credit companies literally lend you money at some ill interest percentage to pay back, with the theory that you'll keep spending so you'll keep having to pay it back. And if you don't (or can't), they'll just take your shit. Unless you're really savvy, and just use your card to buy food. I've never seen repo men raiding a fridge for that bottle of applesauce Visa said you brought from the "Shop N'Bag".
And this government recently changed the bankruptcy laws against us. Not that bankruptcy was anything anyone wanted to go through, but now it's been written so that your climb out of any sort of debt is all but impossible...unless you're rich, of course.
The credit (and now mortgage) companies we're allowed to make their services more attractive to those seeking "the american dream" as rates they could "afford", but when the jobs started breaking out for overseas pastures, and businesses were not using their tax cuts to create more jobs people went broke... or more broke depending on who you are. This caused the mortgage crisis. With the rising cost of... EVERYTHING, people simply couldn't keep up, and a once sweetheart deal of home ownership became a coffinnail.

Here's the twist: If the company gets bailed out of the crisis, who bails out the person who paid into the system?

As goes the mortgage crisis, now an auto loan crisis looms. With a credit card crisis of similar, if not worse proportions lurking over the horizon.