I was in the car with my mom yesterday, she’s been trying to buy a house. We talked about the economy for the most part, how much people are hurting right now. How the trailer she’s looking at costs the same as the house I grew up in. Now, my only source for this one is my mom but walk with me here. Apparently, everything you buy (excluding what you can get with straight cash) is based on credit. Pretty basic. Now what I didn’t know was that in order to build credit, you can’t actually ever pay off what you owe. If you totally pay everything down, your account is marked as inactive. If you keep a balance–in my eyes but probably not in some real economists’–you stay in debt. Mom keeps a balance of $10.00 on both cards to keep building credit and just pays it off over and over again, but still that system of keeping people constantly in some level of debt as a whole seems rather messed up. I know I’m young but something about that just makes me feel grimy and very small. Only allowed to move forward one square at a time.