I don’t think I’ve ever used a credit card “access check” to buy groceries, but I have used them to pay rent because of job & income insecurity. For nearly two decades I would find myself needing to use credit cards to pay for food and groceries. Now that most of my debt is gone and my credit score has gone way up, I get a LOT MORE credit card offers and access checks with limited time offers of 0% interest for a period of time. After that period of time, the remaining balance will get charged 13%-29% APR depending upon the card. I remember a time in my life when these temporary access checks and balance transfers were a life line between jobs, paychecks, or when tax season rolled around. 

I now understand better how the system works: flood desperate people with temporary solutions that will only put them greater in debt over time. I hear a lot of fiscally conservative people say there needs to be more personal accountability & individual responsibility, people just “need to get their house in order”. What about the people who don’t have a house with a yard in order to grow their own strawberries?

— Original statement for the piece