On September 6th of 1620, to flee religious persecution and maintain their English cultural identity, a group of separatists dubbed, the Pilgrims, boarded the Mayflower to sail across the Atlantic to establish a free colony in the New World. And just as one needs capital in the modern day to build a home or buy a new car, the Pilgrims needed money to finance their voyage to the Americas – an oft omitted fact in grade school textbooks.
Black Friday is just another day of the year companies promote rampant consumerism – and encourage you to take on debt. Don’t buy into these for-profit schemes. Save your money and put it toward meaningful experiences or, if you’re like the average American, paying off your debt to secure your financial freedom.
In September of this year, Equifax, one of the “big three” credit reporting bureaus in the US, announced their servers had been subject to a massive security breach, compromising the personal data of roughly 145.5 million Americans – that’s nearly half the population of the United States.
Credit card debt is a widespread problem in the US: an estimated 29 million Americans have carried a credit card balance for more than two years, while 1 in 4 do not regularly pay off their balances each month. In total, Americans owe nearly $784 billion to credit card companies, while individual households owe an average of $17,000.
