Inside Marcy's Mind

A best of Episode! Women, Credit, And Claiming Power

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Enjoy this Best of Episode while I wander through Ireland. Ever wonder how different your life would look if you couldn’t open a bank account without someone else’s signature? We go from a fresh start in a Chicago high-rise to the surprising truth that U.S. women only gained equal access to credit in the 1970s—and why that history still shapes daily choices. I share the joy of downsizing, finding a tight-knit “pool pals” community, and rebuilding health, then connect that momentum to money power: credit as trust, autonomy, and safety.

We rewind to my first job at Sears Credit Central, paper applications and all, and trace the path from metal charge plates to Diners Club, AmEx, and MasterCard. Along the way, I break down how high-interest debt quietly taxes your future, when rewards actually make sense, and simple guardrails that keep you in control: pay in full, know your rates, automate savings, and check your credit reports. If you’re partnered, you’ll hear a candid take on shared finances—how to avoid silent drift or endless fights, and why every woman needs accounts in her own name, documented access, and a clear will and beneficiaries.

This debut sets the tone for what’s ahead: short, smart, and grounded in real life. We’ll widen the lens beyond aging to money, relationships, and the choices that let us live lighter and stronger. If you’ve got a story, expertise, or a question you want explored, I want to hear it. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a boost of financial confidence, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show. What money habit changed your sense of freedom?

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to Inside Marcy's Mind. My name is Marcy Backis, and I am your host. This is our first episode, and I am so excited to have you join me here on Inside Marcy's Mind. I am not a new podcaster. I've been podcasting for the last two years. I am a self-made podcaster. I do my own music selection, which for this one was really hard because I love my music from my last podcast. But I think I did a good job. Hope it made you feel energized and excited because it did me. I have been a podcaster, like I said, for two years. I was doing a podcast called Aging Aim for Siss, which ran its course. It was a two-year podcast. And I think I touched on every subject I could. And I started thinking about it and I thought, doggone it, I got more information in my mind. Things come to me on a daily basis. We're going to start this uh with a single Monday drop. It's going to have a Monday drop. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching me on YouTube, welcome. YouTubers, happy to have you here. I'm going to let you know that you can find me on YouTube at Marcy'sMind. You can find me if you want to email me, inside Marcy'sMind at gmail.com. And my website, you can get anything we talk about. I will have episodes, the YouTube episodes up there, the videos, etc. Um, insidemarcy's mind.com. I know that's a lot of information, and we'll talk about that as we go. Um, I know a lot of you are returnees from Aging A for Sissies, but you're gonna have to forgive me. I'm gonna have to explain who I am to my new audience. So I am 63 years old. I'm a mother of two. I live in downtown Chicago, and I am a two-year transplant to the city of Chicago from California. Um, we've lived in several places. We lived in Oregon, we lived in Texas, we lived in Denmark. Um, so I've lived a lot of places, but I will tell you, this is my time, and this is my place, and this is my city. So I am happier than I've been in a very long time. I'm feeling better than I have in a very long time. I um spent the last year really working on myself. Uh I hope that comes across in my podcast, and I hope that you feel it as well. I moved here, thought I was doing fine, and realized a year in that I was not. And mentally, I was not doing well physically. I sucked. I had I had already been carrying about 30 pounds extra for 10 years since I turned from 50 to 60. I don't know why. I don't really care why. I assume it's got some big meaning, but nonetheless, and then I moved here and gained another 20 pounds and physically felt like crap, physically looked like crap, and was not happy. And I made a decision to join a gym. Now, in my fancy building, we have a gym. But I felt that it was important for me to get out and be with people. And I joined a gym called Equinox right up the street here on Michigan Avenue, and they have a pool and they had water aerobics. Well, doggone it if I didn't just find the greatest group of women in that water aerobics. They're called the pool pals. They've been together since 2006 and they welcome me with open arms. I have friendship, I have fun, I have a life, I have lunches and brunches and teas, and I'm living my best life. And on top of that, I live with my husband, Craig, and my two cats, Patrick and Pickles. So you'll hear about Patrick and Pickles. Right now, Patrick's sleeping over to my left and pickles is hiding somewhere. Craig, I have a husband. His name is Craig. We've been married 33 years. This year we'll be 34 in December. Marriage is not easy. Marriage is not always happy. We'll talk about that, I'm sure, in episodes to come. But we've been together a long time. And the thought of starting over is just not something I want to do, but I'll tell you, it's not always easy. So today Craig is out of the condo. He is at his family home that he and his three sisters are sorting and going through and picking and choosing and getting rid of and all of that. And that's a lot. That's an emotional thing, I think, every time they do it. I see for the three of them, if any of you are listening, I see that it's been really healing. And as your sister-in-law, that makes me super happy. So again, we are going to talk about aging on this podcast because we're talking about Marcy's mind and what's in it. And we're going to have it, it opens up subjects to so much more for this podcast than my other podcasts. And that's goes for today's um episode. When we get into the episode part, um, I usually always talk about myself for a little while. And then I always have a subject that we talk about. So today's subject, just so you know, is going to be about women and money. And um you'll see what that all entails talking about women and money. What else do you need to know about me? I uh I love the city of Chicago. I really have found a fondness for it here. I moved from a very big home in a suburb of Orange County, California to a very small condo in the city of Chicago. I'm 36 floors up. I don't know if on YouTube you can kind of see the building behind me. We have a one-bedroom, one-bath condo, and I wouldn't have it any other way. We bought this condo 24 years ago, speaking about women and money. We bought this as an investment property. It was um rented out all those years. And then when we had an opportunity to move here, we came. Excuse me, we already had a place to live, so it seemed like the perfect fit. Would I have one more bedroom? Yeah. If I was buying today, but I remember back when we bought this and we have in-unit laundry, which doesn't seem like a big deal until you don't have in-unit laundry. And when we bought this, we were looking at a two-bedroom, and this unit, particular unit, had had in-unit laundry put in, which I'm grateful for because now you can't do it anymore. And we're grandfathered into the in-unit laundry. We have a giant laundry room downstairs, but I don't want to drag crap. I like having my own laundry. So we didn't buy the two-bedroom because it didn't have in-unit laundry. And I had thought at the time it would be easier to rent out a unit that has in-unit laundry. Well, I was right about that. Um, our unit never went unrented in 20 some odd years. And uh now we're living in it, and I'm glad we have in-unit laundry. We've done some remodeling, we redid the kitchen, we did a walk-in shower and redid the bathroom. So it's all my place. It's all up to my standards, and I love it. It's a fabulous building. We have roof deck terraces, we have a pool, and I really love it. And let me tell you something, people. I do not miss a giant house. And if you're living in your big old house thinking this is the life, great for you. But if you ever downsize and get rid of all your crap, you're gonna be happy. I'll tell you, I don't miss any of my stuff. Everybody that knows me knows I got rid of 90% of everything we owned. Did it by myself because Craig was already here in Chicago? And I'll tell you something, I look back on that, and this is the time of year that I look back on it because this is the time of year I was doing it. And I don't know how I did it. And it's something I think when you're in the middle of something, you just move forward, you go, you go, you do. And then when you're done, you're just like, whoa, that was a lot. But uh yeah, that's what's going on with me. And I am so excited with Inside Marcy's mind. I hope that you enjoy this podcast. I hope it gives you everything you're looking for in a podcast. We're gonna always be a 30-minute or less episode. This is meant to be well, you're in the car going a short distance, or you're doing your walk, or you're on the treadmill, or you're walking to the gym. Um, it's never gonna be a super long episode. Um, if I do well and I and I'm happy with it and I think I have enough to say, because I never want just noise. If I think I have enough to say, we may up it to two episodes a week. But, you know, right now we're gonna start with the one. I do travel a lot. Those of you that know me, when I go, I take it on the road. I do have regular people that I interview. Those people are still gonna be a part of the podcast. But what I love is that we're gonna be able to increase the people that we interview because it doesn't have to be about aging. And I have friends I'd love to interview. I we did interview my husband once on the last podcast. That was pretty funny. He's pretty funny when he wants to be. Just his answer to questions is funny if you know Craig. So, all right. Well, enough about me. I think you have the lay of the land. You know who I am. I'm 63 years old, 63 years young. I would have told you a year ago that I felt 85. I'll tell you now I feel 40. And I'm going with what I feel, not what I say on paper. So, welcome to Inside Marcy's Mind. All right, well, what's inside Marcy's mind? What's inside Marcy's mind is I something came across a little while ago to me, and it was about women in credit. And I had no idea. Now, I graduated from high school in 1978, and I went to work for Sears Credit Central. Oh gosh, what year was that? Oh, probably 79, 1979. And what what Sears Credit Central was, it was a little building. Now, back in the day, you filled out a little paper application and you sent it into whatever store you wanted your credit card. Believe it or not, we kept those applications. And let me take a little sip here. And we kept them on file. And I worked in a place where I don't know if you remember when you were in a store, if you either didn't make a payment or you hit your limit, they would make a phone call. Well, I would pick up that phone call and they'd say, Hi, I have Suzy Davis here. And um, she's trying to buy a refrigerator, but her credit limit isn't high enough. And I'd run over, find Susie Davis' application. I'd take it to my supervisor, who was Cindy, by the way, and she is still a friend of mine, and she would say, Okay, find out if they're still working, if they've gotten a raise, so on. And I'd go get that information and then I'd run back to Cindy. And Cindy said, Okay, I think we can cover it, and we'd raise the credit limit. Well, while I was doing that in 1979, I did not realize that women only had the right for five years at that time to have their own credit card. Now think about that. That was a mere 50 years ago, ladies and gentlemen that are listening. 50, just 50 years ago, women couldn't have credit cards. We couldn't have bank accounts, and if we did, we had to be co-signed by a man. Now just think back. What did that do to women? It forced women into marriage just to have a financial security. Even if they had jobs that were high enough paying, which you know, in that time was rare, they couldn't have a credit card, they couldn't have a bank account, they couldn't do anything financially without the signature of a man. Credit cards are an inescapable part of our life right now. But it wasn't that long ago, think about it, that women didn't have a right to open their own credit cards. So what happened? Well, there was an act, and I believe it was Gerald Ford at the time signed a finally a bill that allowed women to have credit. So I want you to think about it. Getting credit is a big part of financial freedom. It was 50 years ago, half the population didn't have it. The word credit is based on the idea of trust. So think about credit. They're trusting you to pay it. When a bank issues you a credit card, it is expressing trust that you are a responsible adult who will pay your bills. Not giving women credit cards was a way of treating women like children and keeping women under men's control. I totally believe that. It was a white man's world back in the day. And to an extent it still is. Getting to control your own credit cards and spending decisions is not just about personal finance. It's about a fundamental right to privacy, autonomy, and human dignity. What if a woman was in an abusive relationship and a controlling spouse wouldn't let her spend money? What if a woman was a primary breadwinner in her household and was better equipped to manage credit cards and bills than her lower income husband? Could you imagine that being in a relationship where you were the breadwinner, but you still had no rights? I don't know, crazy, right? Um, and and if you look back on old TV shows, you can kind of see this playing out. Look at Lucy always asking Ricky for money. I know it's funny, and I know it can make you laugh, but I want you to really think about that. Denying women credit cards was really bad for business. Think of all the money that banks and credit card companies have made in the last 50 years since then. They started issuing credit cards to 100% of the adult population instead of just 50%. Financial inclusion is the right thing to do. It is good for financial institutions, it's good for the global economy, it's good for everyone. Um the interesting thing is, I don't know, um, one of the things I read is that the first credit card was Diners Club. And I know you've always seen the Diners Club. Who knew that Diners Club was the first credit card? And they did it so that business lunches could be paid for while people were eating out. Let's think about credit cards a little bit. It's kind of fun. Um, you used to have a raised numbers on your credit card so they could do the credit card member machine. What else? Um my first credit card was a Sears credit card because I work for Sears. I can still remember my number. It's 877-935-530452. I don't know why I can remember that number, but I can. And uh that was my very first credit card. I then had a Joseph Magnus credit card because my mother worked at Joseph Magnan's. She um when I was in fourth grade, she went back to work and she worked there. Joseph Magnans was a department store in the San Fernando Valley. There was I Magnan and Joseph Magnan, they were brothers. So one of the things that I've I left out, and um they issued metal plates called metal money. Those were the first credit cards. Those were a precursor to the modern credit card. So um the metal plates allowed the customer to defer payments on purchases they made. So they were kind of like a layaway system. Um, it would be for a particular purchase. It was called a charge it card. Um there charge your plate. And you, if you heard that, that's because of those metal plates back in the day. So then there was the dawn of the modern credit card, and that happened in 1949. So it was a long time before women were allowed a credit card, if you think about that. Um, Diners Club credit card again was one of the first. Then it was followed by um American Express. Bank America. There was MasterCard and Bank Americard, and then several others. So the the credit card as we know it today has high interest rates. They are a trap. So I guess women should be grateful we were let into the trap of credit. I think credit cards have a place, but they are overused. And in America, we use them way too much. There's been many times that we've had our credit cards charged way too high, and you're paying a very high interest. If you use them smart, which is how we do now, you use them during the month, you earn rewards and points and things like that, and then pay them off. They're a much better tool than if you're using them to carry credit. But back to women and credit cards, I can't believe that it was just a simple 50 years ago that women were denied credit. They had to have men sign for them. If you're young and you're listening, I want you to understand that just 50 years ago, women had no financial freedom, no financial rights. Look at where you are now. You have checking accounts, savings accounts, you can invest in the stock market. All of those things that were denied to women a mere 50 years ago. So, what I want women to understand is your financial freedom is new. And I want you to use it. I want you to make sure that everything is not in your husband's name. That is very archaic. That you have control. Uh, Craig has always given me financial control, and now I have too much financial control because sometimes I wish he was in the mix on making decisions. But I make most of our big financial decisions, and he trusts me. And I can't imagine a marriage being any other way. We talked a little bit about marriage being hard. And I think finances is one of the biggest problems in a marriage for people. Either the lack of discussing or discussing it too much. You can have a marriage where nobody ever discusses it and everything falls by the wayside or falls apart, or you can have a point where it's just constant conversation. Neither one of those things are right. I think you need to find, as anything, a happy medium in your financial discussions. But for something that's come so new to women, I think it's pretty amazing that women take it seriously, uh, understand finances, understand your finances, understand investing, understand your investments, make sure that you have, if you are young and you do have all of these things and you're investing and you're figuring things out, make sure that you do have a will. So that all your hard work, if anything was to happen to you, doesn't go by the wayside. These are things to think about financially. So this is just a little something that's been in my head. I it was fun to go back and think about working at Sears Credit Central, having paper applications and all of that, and that they did live and they did store them somewhere, and we did use them to make your credit decisions for you. And um, you know, sometimes people didn't make a payment and yeah, you weren't getting that stuff. And I had to tell them I was young. That was a great job. I loved it. Well, I hope you enjoyed the first episode of Inside Marcy's Mind. Again, where can you find me? You're going to be able to find these podcasts anywhere you find your podcasts. You're going to be able to find it at insidemarcy's mind.com. You can share it with your friends there. You can find me at YouTube. Hey, YouTube. You can find me at YouTube at Marcy's Mind. That's our YouTube channel. So you can find the episodes, you can watch from there, you can listen from there. Um, you have to put up with a little my falderall that happens during this, but uh it's a great way if you want to watch. You can email me at insidemarcy's mind at gmail.com. Please email me what you want to hear, what you want me to cover, what you're thinking about, what's on your mind. I know we've got a hot political climate right now. I have feelings. Just like most of you have feelings. I'm never gonna shove my opinion down your throat, but we may explore things from time to time that are political. I'm willing to talk about anything. If you have information and you want to be interviewed, and I find that it's valid, I would be happy to interview you with your information. We can talk about books, we can talk about life, we can talk about just about anything that's inside Marcy's head.

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Marcy Backhus

Host