After 50 years of work, my mother retired and moved into a little rental house near me. Having lived paycheck to paycheck all her life, Mama’s financial skills were non-existent.

About twenty years earlier, she had opened her first checking account and started bouncing checks. She didn’t like to bother me, but it got out of hand, and she finally called me. Turns out, Mama didn’t bother doing all the math, she just called the bank and asked how much money she had in her account – and then she spent it. When her checks hit the bank, her money was gone. Once we sorted that misunderstanding out, she was fine.

A few months after Mama moved in, I noticed new things were appearing around her house. She told me her social security was more than she’d expected. But she did not say how much and I assumed… well, I assumed it was enough for all this new stuff.

One afternoon, I was visiting and went to the bathroom when a very big pile of QVC boxes in Mama’s bedroom caught my eye. I had to drag it out of her, but my mother had acquired three credit cards – and she’d been using them. Eventually, she handed me the bills and I did the math. My poor mother had sixteen thousand dollars in credit card debt and less than fifty dollars to her name. Worse yet, they were headed to collections.

Mama thought all she had to pay was the minimum amount. Except, she’d only looked at the first bill, then sent them a check for that amount every month – and kept buying more stuff. Long story short, Mama gave the debt collectors my phone number and I told a couple hundred debt collector callers that everybody knows, you can’t get blood out of a turnip – and my mother was a turnip!

Mama never paid those credit card bills. The way I figure it, any financial institution that gives credit cards to a woman living on social security, deserves to eat turnips.

I still think of Mama as a vigilante.