Why do I love the Credit Wellness Clinic so much? Because it empowers people to take back control of their lives and gives them hope for a future that is brighter than the lives they are living today.

Why is insufficient credit one of the major barriers to housing for PWA's?  Because credit is something for people with a future. By it's very nature, it is future focused. It is paying in the future for a good or service that is consumed today. When we get sick, we lose our sense of the future. Credit is something for the normal people. After we get sick, our credit gets wrapped up in all of the emotional baggage around our mortality. After our lives crumble when we become disabled, we hobble along, ghosts of our former selves. We lose our income, our credit tanks, and we just shove all of that emotional shame into the back of the psychic sock drawer. We take a Gone With the Wind approach, "I can't deal with that today. I'll deal with that tomorrow. After all, tomorrow  IS another day". Well guess what Scarlet, it's tomorrow!

This was all well and good when we were dying. But we've come upon a day of reckoning. We've been trapped in that Den of the Undead. Not alive, not dead. Just existing. Many of us thought we could just go on like that, and then another tragedy strikes and must confront these issues in an unplanned way. Suddenly we find ourselves being evicted from our homes, going up to prospective new landlords and trying to find a home when we have an income under $1000 per month, no deposit money and no credit.

I tell folks we can't do anything about the fact we have AIDS. Too late. We can't do anything about how little our disability checks are. We need to focus our energy on what we can control. We can control our savings choices, even putting away $5 per month is better than not saving anything. We can choose to start working on our credit. We can choose to improve our chances, should that awful day come and we join the ranks of the thousands of other people with AIDS who have been evicted by those evil speculators.

To help folks gain control of their destiny again, we have started our weekly Credit Wellness Clinics. We meet at Noon each Friday to address different aspect of improving our credit. Topics include: Budgeting & Spending, (re)Building credit, Savings and Homeownership. Yep, I said homeownership. I'm disabled and I just bought my condo in SF. (Find out more in the class). One of our members is poised to buy his home too and another member is putting together the business plan to open his own business. All of this is possible because they did the work to get their credit in order. You can too.