The mortgage crisis -- Fight back with creative living.

I’m not an economist, just an average every day American Joe, but the current situation with credit, mortgage firm failures and the skyrocketing costs have me worried. I can balance my checkbook, create a good personal budget and manage the budget of my department at the office. I have no idea of how to operate in the greater financial sector. I don’t think I need a PhD in economics to understand a few things.

The larger picture of finance and the economy in America is designed and manipulated to keep you and I under someone’s control. I earn a decent lower-middle class salary, I actually pay more in taxes per year than I grossed 10 years ago. I work hard and I’ve worked my way up from being an ex-sailor working construction sites as a pipefitter to heading a small IT department.

50 years ago I would be living the so-called American dream. I’d have a new ranch house, family, small luxuries of life. I would drive a new ’57 Chevy station wagon, take the kids to Florida every year and put aside pennies each week to save for the future.

Today I don’t own a home. The properties have been wildly over priced and the mortgage conditions hide (or at least they did hide) a time bomb. Within a few years I would be homeless with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt hanging around my neck. I don’t have a savings account because between nearly invisible low interest rates and astronomical bank fees I would actually be losing money every day just to maintain an account.

My job isn’t secure because the industry I work in is tied to the fact that other people have to spend more and more money every day to keep the company I work for, afloat. If I loose it I will be giving up minimal benefits for lower pay and less benefits with longer working hours. That is, if I can find a job.

I burned my credit cards a year ago. I am still paying off a transmission rebuild that I had to pay for several years ago on my old car and a rental car I had to have while the transmission was being rebuilt. By time that debt is paid off I will have spent enough money that I actually could have bought an older used car.

I looked at my old bank statements from seven years ago last weekend out of curiosity and it made me sick. I pay four times as much for gasoline, I pay three times as much for groceries and I buy fewer groceries than I did back then and I pay almost three times as much for electricity. My earnings have increased by 32% but my total expenses have increased more than 600%. All the savings that I had are long gone and I am actively looking for a cheaper apartment.

Burn your credit cards. Go to CCCS and pay off the old debts. Grow a vegetable garden or buy the cheapest foods that you can store in your pantry and stock up. Buy a bike and ride it when you can or use public transportation. Car pool with your co-workers. Don’t look at it as skimping by to survive. Take your financial stand against those who hold you down with money by denying them access to it.

The men who control every aspect of our lives do so with money. They hold your job, your access to affordable health care and your right to the pursuit of happiness in their hands via money. Remove their influence by not obsessing over your credit score as though it were your key to heaven. Remove their influence by using your creativity to earn money or goods by exercising your creativity. Use those creative urges by planting a garden or creating objects that can be sold or bartered.

Do not allow yourself to live in misery under their thumbs. Prick that thumb with your sharp mind.