Girl, When Did You Learn About Personal Credit

Question, did your parents teach you about the ins and outs of credit or was it one of those "knowledge under fire" moments. For me it was a definitely a one-two combo. Lemme explain. I was pretty much raised by a single mom and extremely close to my maternal family. As the first everything (daughter, grandchild, niece), I was exposed to a mish-mosh of what to do, what not to do, you should have done.

My mom was 19 when I was born and my dad was away fighting in the Vietnam war. With that as a backdrop (in terms of the era), credit was not on a card but more so a relationship between a retailer and a consumer. Furthermore, few if any women had "credit" without a man.

My grandmother's first exposure to credit was as an authorized user on my grandfather's Macy's card (go figure). So my grandfather was my first educator. And what that meant was only use credit for emergencies. Welp, he was 75% right... Check out my next post for the 25% I had to get educated on real fast!