Mills, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars … these coins are rapidly becoming extinct. Mills are extinct. A mill was one tenth of one cent and used as a sales tax to fund the “Old Age Pension”and that, too, is extinct. A few years ago, pennies were considered useless and of no real monetary value. Now, in 2020, there is a coin shortage. What’s happening in American monetary matters?
Our nation is operating on faux money. A dollar is not worth a dollar. You have to have 2.7 million of them to be considered wealthy. Now that’s what I call inflation or deflation or something!
My first job at age 7 paid me 25 cents per week to deliver and collect for newspapers. My bag carried 154 of them folded and ready to be thrown onto front porches five evenings every week. On Friday evenings, I collected 15 cents from my customers for their five newspapers. The ones who were not at home were visited by me on Saturday morning. Once in a while, a patron would give me a nickel tip.
That was a big deal! It was amazing what a nickel would buy! (By the way, I knew how to make change.)
In those days, money was real. I was growing up in a house that my parents gave $750 to purchase. It was two and a half bedrooms (one was very small), a dining room, and a small kitchen. There was no bath, just a path. We were as comfortable and happy as if we had good
sense! No one was” being eaten alive” by a craze for money. The garden and a hog supplied us with most of our food with just a minor amount of supplementation by an occasional trip to do some “trading.”
I hope I have your attention because we’ve come a long way baby!
Everything is about credit and debt. Credit comes first because that’s what gets you into debt. Credit was made to sound like a positive, so you would want to have “good” credit. The problem was (and still is), you had to have debt before you could have “good” credit. Get the picture?
In the next few installments of “Upstairs Over A vacant Lot” I will be writing about money management, freedom from debt, the truth about the monetary system, and how to get ahead when you’re behind.
Stay tuned.
P.S. Watch for: “When Is Enough Really Enough?
