A Country That Is $40 Trillion in Debt Says I'm a 'Credit Risk' So I'm Not Allowed to Have a Safe Home

Or: 'Why Can't I Get into a Freaking Apartment?!'

My friend Maddie over at Books Behind Borders posted a note this week about how a country that is 40 freakin’ trillion dollars in debt has the nerve to be assigning her a credit score. I laughed. Then the laugh kinda died because I was reading her note from the edge of a motel bed that costs me TWO GRAND A MONTH! She wasn’t just ranting about a problem. She was describing my life.

I’m 42. I have NEVER taken out a loan in my life. No credit card, no financed couch, no leased car. None of it. Everything I own I bought with cash I saved up first because the young cub version of The Wise Wolf made a rule - if you need a loan to own a something then you don’t need it.

For most of human history being fiscaclly responsible made you the most respected man in your quaint village. Today it makes you homeless.

Not homeless in the living under a bridge sorta sense. Homeless in the newer, stupider, and distinctly ‘American’ sense. I earn enough for a nice apartment. I have months of rent saved in actual CASH. And I still can’t legally rent one because the algorithm that decides who gets shelter in this country looked at 25 years of paying with cash and said I am a ‘null entity’.

I wish that was an exaggeration. When a leasing office runs my credit pretty much nothing comes back. I’ve bought everything I’ve ever owned in cash paid in full, upfront, from day one and the official verdict of the American financial system is that I DO NOT EXIST.

Realtors squint at my application like it’s a blurry photo of Bigfoot. ‘Truly fascinating Mr. Wolf. Still can’t approve your application though.’

I know why the file’s empty. My phone is prepaid. My computers I buy with cash on the counter. No monthly contracts anywhere in my life because I don’t like owing people money. That turns out to be the ONE financial sin this country cannot forgive. See, the credit score doesn’t measure whether you pay for things. It measures whether you BORROW.

The whole thing is a loyalty program for debt. You could have a hundred grand stuffed in a mattress and the system sees nothing. Miss two payments on a Kirby vacuum in 2011 and it remembers you FOREVER.

(Meanwhile… Try and hold all of that in your head while I say this next part.)

The government of the country running this system is 40 FREAKING TRILLION dollars in the hole. Much of it is owed to China. It was all borrowed from the Federal Reserve, which is about as federal as Federal Express. Not a government agency. A private banking consortium that conjures money out of nowhere. And I mean NOWHERE.

The money is not real. It was never real. When they run low they just announce more of it into existence like a kid playing store.

(Fun fact while we’re in the neighborhood: the Treasury Department founded the Secret Service in 1865 to protect the currency. Not the president. The CURRENCY. Presidents got added to the job description 36 years and three dead presidents later. Priorities people!)

So follow this all the way down. There is an entity that has borrowed more money than any entity in the history of planet Earth. It cannot stop borrowing. It borrows NEW money just to pay the interest on the OLD money. And that entity looked at my file and decided the credit risk here is me. The guy who never borrowed a dime.

The guy that just wants a ceiling over his head that doesn’t have a drug dealer or a married man cheating on his wife on the other side of it.

The Cash Incident

The apartment hunt started three months ago. The motel life is in year seven now, I’ll get to that so brace yourself. Early in the hunt I found a great place. Only twelve hundred a month with utilities, safe neighborhood, gated community, it even has a pool! The most dangerous thing on the entire property is the speed bump at the front gate.

I didn’t walk in hoping they’d overlook the empty credit file. I walked in with a plan that made the file irrelevant (or so I hoped.) I sat down across from the leasing agent and offered to pay the entire six month lease upfront. In CASH.

She smiled the smile they teach in leasing school. “I’m sorry sir, but our corporate policy states you must meet our minimum credit score criteria.”

Okay, maybe she misheard me, I thought. I tried again slower.

‘I am offering to pay the entire six month lease, upfront, in cash, ma’am. All of it. Right now. There is no version of the future where I fail to pay you rent because the rent will already be PAID. That’s what paid means. It’s the past tense of pay.’

“I’m sorry sir, but that just isn’t the way we do business.”

Not the way you do business! I could have SCREAMED at this woman.

Your business is trading shelter for money and I just tried to hand you ALL of the money in advance. Every business in the entirety of human history has accepted that arrangement. The guy selling sunglasses out of a duffel bag at the gas station accepts that arrangement. And you’re telling me NO because an Equifax database somewhere in an Atlanta server farm has never heard of me.

I stood outside that beautiful gate for a while afterward and that’s when it clicked. They don’t want money. Money was never the product. They want DEBT HISTORY. Proof that I’ve spent my life renting money from banks like a good boy.

The system doesn’t punish you for failing it.

I finally understood…

It punishes you for never needing it in the first place.

What $2,000 a Month Buys

The apartment I can’t rent costs $1,200 a month. The motel I CAN rent because motels do not run a credit check costs $2,000. An $800 monthly stupidity tax and the stupidity isn’t even mine. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is?

You might be thinking,‘What does the extra 800 buy?’

A room that looks like the establishing shot of a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ but with me as the main character. Not Norman Bates. The ‘girl’ that he murders. But with a penis.

The carpet has a past. It’s got a bathroom fan that sounds like it’s passing a kidney stone. An air conditioner that has NEVER WORKED. Not once in my entire nine month tenancy. The owner insists I broke it. The owner is an overweight, excessively hairy, Russian ex-gopnik covered in bad prison tattoos and has screamed at me about this air conditioner on multiple occasions at volumes the whole property got to enjoy. I say the machine was dead when I arrived. He screams back that I owe him five hundred bucks cash for breaking his AC unit.

Those screaming matches are why I have to leave in three days. And this is where the funny drains out of the article, so consider yourself warned.

Moving means something different when you live like I’m forced to live. You pick another off-highway motel. You pay a month upfront because anything shorter costs even more. Then you find out what you bought. There’s no review site for this. You never know which ones are dangerous until you’re already inside. Beaten up, robbed, threatened, etc. All of it has happened to me at these places before. Years ago a cartel dope dealer murdered two prostitutes who were working out of the motel three rooms down from mine. I heard the screams, then the shots, in that order. I hear both every single time I slide my ID across a new check-in counter while some quiet part of my brain asks, is this one of those. There’s never any way to know.

That’s not a bit. No joke coming. I just live with it.

A few months back I was outside my room enjoying my one daily luxury, a single Nat Sherman cigarette (they taste like brown sugar, they are the one vice I kept from my younger days and they’re the last ‘classy’ thing I can afford since I got out of hacking and corporate espionage as my source of income. Maybe someday I’ll write about my past. The statute of limitations are up now anyways).

Then roughly 10 cops in SWAT gear came around the corner at a dead sprint and knocked me flat on the concrete. The second wave stopped to harass ME over the suspicious activity of standing in front of a room I pay $2,000 a month for.

Then they battering-rammed a door down the walkway and dragged out the guy who lived there along with his two girlfriends. Everybody got zip-tied face down on the concrete. One of the girlfriends had a broken and bleeding nose. She must have been standing behind the door when it came in.

I filmed it, which is legal. An officer made me delete the footage, which is not legal.

(I complied anyway.)

A drug task force SWAT unit is basically its own psychotic military and I know exactly how much it wants to hear about the First Amendment from a nobody at a motel.

This is the neighborhood my perfect payment history earned me.

These places are full of drug dealers and hookers. That’s not a slur or knock on these people, I understand they aren’t doing that because they enjoy it. They are doing that sorta work because that’s the harsh reality of life. But the part that actually breaks my heart is the rest of the walkway. Entire families in single rooms. Kids doing homework on bedspreads while their parents work full time. Same trap as mine. No credit, no cosigner, no way through the gate. They pay luxury apartment money for a room with a hot plate. There are millions of us now. A whole shadow class of Americans who can afford housing and aren’t PERMITTED to have it.

Three Days

I’m writing this at night because writing takes my mind off my life and right now that is what I need because in three days I check out of here with no idea where I’m checking in. The candidates are a handful of motels further down the highway. Pretty much identical from the outside. Each one is a sealed envelope that costs a month’s rent to open.

A regular job used to get me out of these rooms ten hours a day. Now I work for myself, the room is also the office, I’m here around the clock. I listen to the walls. I do threat math on every raised voice in the parking lot. I’ve seen too much rugged shit go down in the last 7 years to just be able to relax in the place I am paying two grand a month to live in. That is the mortgage on a nice house with property out in the country where I grew up. In the city it’s a step above the street. Barely.

Lily is still off at summer journalism camp. August is when the high school juniors and seniors go, the busiest stretch of the whole season she says. She’s teaching these kids how to find a college with a good journalism program and what to actually expect once they get there. She’s also teaching them to start writing on Substack NOW, while they are still in high school and going off to college. That way they graduate with a body of work to show an employer instead of just a degree. I told her last night on chat that I was stressed out about what I was going to do. She told me to focus, be strong, and try not to worry so much. God bless her, she means it with her whole heart.

But Lily has had a good life. She’s never heard gunshots through drywall and I hope to God she never does. One of us should get to stay that way.

But I’m scared. There it is, no joke wrapped around it. I’m a grown man with income and savings habits that would make a financial advisor weep with joy. In three days I’m out of here with nowhere to check in. All because I never rented money from a bank. In a country that has rented 40 TRILLION dollars and counting.

The government’s credit is fine, by the way.

They checked it themselves.

---

I just want an apartment. A small one with a door SWAT units don’t smash in with a battering ram. Is that really so much to ask? Is it? Someone please tell me it isn’t.

Normally this is where I’d make a charming joke about the newsvan fund. Not today. Today the fund is called Get The Wolf Behind A Real Door. Maybe this piece made you laugh, maybe it made you angry, maybe it made you go check your own credit score just to feel alive. Either way, a paid subscription decides whether next month’s investigation gets written from a desk or from whichever highway motel has the fewest police raids per capita. I’ve started keeping stats on that. Journalist habit. Lily’s spending her summer teaching teenagers to chase the truth for a living and somebody should prove the truth pays at least enough to cover a security deposit.

Become the reason a leasing office finally has to take my money.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.