The Lord knows that I am the last one who should be giving financial advice, but I have been thinking about this topic a lot lately.

Yesterday, I read an article in the newspaper that was very scary to me.  We've all seen the statistics about how much debt Americans have and we have all complained about gas prices.  I don't think I will ever understand how it could go up more than a dollar a gallon in six months.  But this article brought those two things together in a way that really hit home.

Apparently, back in June 1979, there was a riot over gas prices in Levittown, PA.  It lasted two nights, involved thousands of people, left 100 people injured, 200 people were arrested, and one gas station was destroyed.  The article was saying that, so far anyway, no one has rioted over gas prices, and they had 2 reasons why.  One was improved fuel efficiency in today's cars.  The other was the scary one.

"Credit card gasoline purchases, once a sliver of the market, now postpone the need for most drivers to come up with money."  Nationally, about 55 percent of gas sales are paid with a credit card. "The reliance on credit cards delays the bite of price increases for customers, but also cuts into stations' profits because of processing fees...isolated gas stations have begun charging more for credit-card purchases."

Now, if most of the people paying even more for gas are like typical Americans, they are not paying their credit card bills off every month.  Which means that the gas that they are paying for today, they will still be paying for probably years from now.  The article does not mention debit cards, so I don't know if debit card purchases are considered credit card purchases.

So, Americans are not angry about gas prices, they are resigned.  And they can be resigned because they are just putting in on the credit card instead of paying for it.  This state of affairs is NOT sustainable!

I have condensed my financial advice to two lines with a little fine print.  I will be sharing this with my son as he graduates and goes off to college this year.  Quite simply, it's:

DON'T SPEND MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE. 

DON'T SPEND ALL THE MONEY YOU DO HAVE.

The fine print: getting an affordable mortgage is all right.

Now, to take my own advice.  Well, it's really hard to do when you have spent years NOT following this advice and have nearly seven children.  However, we have finally begun to follow line number one.  That's progress anyway.  And, we don't put gas on credit cards.  Although, if it keeps going up, we'll be buying it instead of food. Tasty, huh?

Any Europeans possibly reading this are probably confused about why we use so much gas.  We live 15 miles (that's just over 24 km) from a supermarket.  My husband's job is about 35 km away from our house.  There are no buses or trains or public transportation options.  We cannot walk anywhere. 

Why do we live out in the country?  Because when we wanted to buy a house, the houses in town were, on average, about $270,000, which is more than 2 1/2 times what we could afford.  Prices have only gone up in the last 10 years.  We don't think we could sell our house and move in this bad housing market, even if we could find an affordable place to rent that would allow 6 children.  So, we are stuck here, paying whatever the oil companies feel like charging today.  In May, we have paid $450 on gas (that's 290 Euros).  The only bill we have bigger than that is our mortgage.

It's the economy, stupid.