I think I left the teller at the bank genuinely disturbed when I told him that “If I can’t afford it, I just don’t buy it.” 
“What about a car? Do you drive a car?” he inquired, his voice toning on the edge of fear.  
I told him, “Yeah, I have a vehicle. I bought it used for under $3,000.” 
He looked physically pained. “What about if you want to buy some kind of new appliance? Or furniture?” he persisted.
I stared at him blankly. “My couch was $5.00 at Goodwill. Like…I just buy shit cheap or I don’t buy it at all. The only thing in my life that I make payments on is my house, my bills, and my insurance, and that’s split five ways because I have housemates.” 
The young man looked horrified? Appalled? And somehow also awed? 
This guy couldn’t have been much older than me. But it seemed that he’d never even considered the option before of saving up for something to purchase it outright instead of using a credit card.
Am I the only person in my general age group (just turned 26) who’s never owned a credit card, and who has forgone basic comforts in order to save up for items so you don’t owe money to anyone, like, ever? 

If you’re living in the US without a credit card at 26, you’re playing with danger.

No credit is viewed as the same as bad credit. Which means you could be denied if you ever do need to rent an apartment or a car. Hospitals and clinics are also less likely to allow payment plan programs for people without good credit.

The best thing you could do at this point is apply for a credit card you’re eligible for and pay a few things (I do gas and groceries myself) with it each month. As long as you keep it to zero balance each month there is no interest and there will be proof of you not having debt (instead of just the absence of debt).

what.

This is legit how it works.  The system requires records on you, or else.  So you need a credit card and worse, you need to have a record of using it, even if you pay it off every single month.  Unfortunately, the formulas used to determine credit score are secret, so we also have people suggesting that your credit rating is helped if every so often you do pay a bit of interest.  The whole thing is a complete mess.  If you don’t have a credit rating/history, then any loans you manage to get will be at extremely high interest and will require much more effort than they really should.

what

yeaah let me just go get a card that i can’t pay off because capitalism is shit, even if i literally only buy a pack of gum
that’d go well

If you pay it off in full every month there is no interest.  Do what OP is doing but put some of that on your credit card and pay it off every month, and soon you will have a very good credit rating.

you skipped right the fuck over the “can’t pay it off” part huh

like credit cards are just not a viable thing if you’re poor and have shit income

And I’m saying to literally not put anything on it if you can’t buy it in cash. And I’m aware that they fuck over poor people, but yeah, that’s the system that’s in place. This is advice for navigating it, which is how to obtain good credit which helps a lot.

Right like don’t make minimum payments, put your gas on your credit card then that same day pay the credit card company online then don’t worry about it for another month. It’s an absolutely shit system, but in the event of an emergency it’s good to have.

I have had to explain this to a lot of people in my life, but it’s true- no credit is the same as bad credit. What having (and using) the card actually shows is that you are capable of (and actually follow through on) making regular payments: ie, it is proof of having a steady income (even if you do not actually have a steady income). It is showing you reliably can pay for things you purchase, which is what your credit score is all about.

Think of it this way. You have a credit card, which is your credit tracking device. You use the card to tell someone “I will pay for this thing with borrowed money.” They agree to allow you to pay with borrowed money. You then turn around to your credit card company and say “Thank you for allowing me to borrow your money, I will now pay you back with my own money.” (which, if you repay them promptly enough, you can repay them the exact same amount you borrowed, rather than paying them more than you borrowed [which is what interest is])

The credit card company then recognizes that you successfully borrowed their money AND returned it safely, and they pass that information along to credit tracking companies. Each time you do this, you gain credibility. If you do this enough times, you are considered a credible borrower of money, so that if you ever are in a situation where you need to borrow a large sum of money (for example, a mortgage or a car or a hospital bill or whatever), companies with money will look at how well you have returned money in the past, and say Ah yes, this person repays their debts well, so we can lend them our money this time.

So like, do what the above folks are recommending. Get a credit card and use to to reasonably purchase things you already have to buy- put a batch of groceries on the card. Go home (or wherever you can use the interne), pay it off as if you had paid cash in the store for it. There is no extra fee or interest for doing this, and you are leveling up your credibility in case of emergency later on in life.

Ok, here’s a guide for the easiest way to do this.

1. get your first baby credit card with the bank that you already bank with. If it has cashback rewards, even better (that’ll be free money later).

2. set that shit up so it pays the full amount, automatically, every month. you don’t have to remember to go home and pay it off, or worry about it at all. You won’t pay interest.

Your first card, especially if you have no credit, is going to have a small limit. Like $500. This is important: credit companies want you to use a certain percentage of the card every month. This is 1-9%. I usually just go straight 5%. If you use too much, you look like a wild card (even if you pay it off every month) and if you use nothing than you’re not proving to them you can be trusted.

So your first card has a $500 limit. 5% of 500 is $25.

Your goal is to use $25/month.

This is about a tank of gas for me. So once a month, I would fill up with this card, and then put it in the back of my wallet until next month. The payment was made automatically by my bank from one account (debit) to the other (credit). Rinse and repeat. I did this for a year.

Then after a year, my credit had skyrocketed (because I had nothing before, and added this good habit for a year). So I called up my bank and asked for them to increase my limit based on my new credit. I had shown them I was good at borrowing a good amount of money and paying it back on time every time.

The bank increased my limit to $5,500. Like holy shit, at the time I was definitely not expecting that.

So new math. 5% of 5500 is $225. So now instead of gas, I put my cell phone bill ($50), my car insurance ($130), and my dog food automatic order ($40) on it.

The best part is everything is automatic. I keep this card in the back of my wallet permanently; all these bills and the automatic payments are, well, automatic. My credit goes up, I rack up cash back rewards, there’s nothing to it.

And, if I ever get in an emergency, like a vet bill for one of my dogs, I can use that card to pay the $3,000 emergency bill without worrying about whether the place will take my dog if I have no money. I can then go home, change the settings from “pay in full every month” to “pay $X every month” (more than the minimum!) until it’s paid off, and then go back to just my bills. My credit might take a little dip during that time, but will bounce back pretty quickly.

There’s several other factors to credit (hit me up if you want more info) but this was literally the only measure I took for my first year, and my credit went from 525 to 700 in a year. Another year later, I’m now at 753, have a mortgage with a great rate, and can get a monster ass loan if I really need it in case an emergency or hard times fall.

It’s a shitty system of hoops to jump through, but knowing you can use these measures if it comes to it is a good feeling.

Okay but literally read this entire post please!

Take it from someone who was taught that credit cards are evil, you NEED to build up some credit. 

I’m 32 and only JUST NOW able to get a card because my fiance helped me do so. I could not get approved before because I didn’t have any credit.

A friend texted me asking how to avoid fast fashion and the short answer is: you cant. unless you have the money to make all your own clothes, fast fashion is going to be a part of your life because it has permeated every corner of the fashion industry. However, you can learn basic mending and repair techniques to help your clothes last so that you are contributing far less to the fast fashion industry

Basic Hand Sewing How-to

How to Mend Jeans using Shashiko Methods

How to Mend Clothing (this channel is all about how to sew so check out her other videos)

Repairing a Seam

Re-attach the sole of a shoe

Repair holes in shoes 1 2

Imperialism kills.

They stole the land and killed the children.

I want to put this in perspective for anyone else in Canada: this has happened within less than a century. These are 1665 human beings who would have otherwise been elders today. Thousands of people who should have been able to grow up, live their lives, build families, maintain and pass on traditions, and more, gone because of British colonialism.

The Canadian government and Catholic church intentionally destroyed an entire generation of Indigenous people. Please, support your Indigenous friends, and please stop pretending that Canada is better than America when it comes to institutional racism.

So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?

Yes.

Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.

Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm.  That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and  it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.  

Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point  is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible. 

The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?

There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE

No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.

I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.

Seriously.

Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.

It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.

Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.

You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.

(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )

Jeff Bezos currently has 140 billion dollars.

$10,000 an HOUR while most of us barely making $12. Can y’all conceptualize now?

Will always reblog

Because this is still a difficult set of numbers for some folks to comprehend (legitimately–our brains have a hard time conceptualizing big numbers) a really good example I like to use is the difference between a million and a billion in time.

1 million seconds is approximately 11 days. 

1 billion seconds is just shy of 32 years. 

All of this. I would like to be reasonably wealthy. Heck, I occasionally daydream about the impossible dream of owning a house. A small one.

But I don’t want to be a billionaire. Why? It’s just dick comparing at that point, and I don’t have or particularly need a dick.

So.

Another 751 unmarked graves were found at a Saskatchewan residential school.

Seven hundred fifty one.

The last residential school in Saskatchewan closed in 1996. That's only 25 years ago. This is still a huge issue and many people are still being effected by the system. Fortunately there are ways to help.

1. If you have the means to donate, please do. Many of these organizations also offer volunteer opportunities. Here are some charities to choose from:

• Art for Aid: Supports art and cultural programs for Indigenous students.
• First Nations Child & Family Caring Society: An organization dedicated to providing help and education to Indigenous families.
• Indspire: Focused on the education of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit students, including those who live in remote communities.
• Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami: An organization dedicated to protecting the rights of Inuit people
• Legacy of Hope: Focused on further education on residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the intergenerational effects of the residential school system.
• Native Women's Association of Canada: Specifically dedicated to Indigenous women's rights. Also provides financial support for families. This page on their website provides information on the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, as well as information on what you can do about it.
• True North Aid: Provides humanitarian support for Indigenous communities in Northern Canada.

2. Learn about the local history in your area. You can visit Native-Land.ca and find out which tribe is indigenous to your area. The map on the website is global, so this doesn't just apply to Canadians. Let's say you live in Toronto, which is on the land of the Mississaugas, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat people. Do some research online and learn about their history. Wikipedia is a good place to start. Once you know about the local Indigenous history, you can find out how to help closer to home.