The popularity of debt consolidation has increased in recent years due to many reasons. The main reason is that it enables users to merge all their debts into single loan agreement with reasonable monthly payments and loan terms. Interesting fact revealed by APACS that only in Britain the numbers of credit cards are higher than the numbers of people living there.

According to a careful estimate, the population of the United Kingdom is 60 million and reported numbers of credit cards by the year 2008 were 71.3 million. However, most people prefer taking out debt consolidation loans, while many others prefer taking help from debt solution like debt settlement plans or debt management plans.

Benefits of Debt Consolidation Loan

This loan is the best option for those who are having more than one loan agreements and are unable to pay off all of them. People having multiple loans like credit card debt, overdrafts or huge purchases, small loans often find themselves unable to pay off all these loans. Also, there are clear chances for such people to miss their payments due to having many debts at the same time. Their payments are more likely to be missed, late and expensive. On the other hand, debt consolidation loan merges all such unpaid loans into single loan and allows the borrower to pay off a single reasonable monthly payment.

Downside of Debt Consolidation Loans

It is worth to have a debt consolidation loan to deal with financial troubles; however, sometimes it does not appear as a suitable option. This is due to the following disadvantages of debt consolidation loan.

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All of us who live in the United States, have spent all our lives looking at the same style of paper currency: those things that say “Federal Reserve Note” and have a dead President in the center of the bill in an oval frame. Every now and then the Bureau of Engraving and Printing starts distributing a new design of U.S. currency, we’ve started seeing some variations in the theme; certainly we get to see the details of the portrait engravers’ work much more clearly. Still, though, we rarely stop to appreciate the skill and artistry of the engravers… after all, it’s just money. We just take it out and spend it.

But what if the Bureau of Engraving and Printing decided, as they did in the 1890s, to use our paper money as a showcase for art?

Silver certificates are an older form of U.S. currency; their value was backed by silver held in the U.S. Treasury, and they could be redeemed at the Treasury for silver dollars. An 1886 Act of Congress authorized the creation of a new series of silver certificates, and so it came to pass that the Secretary of the Treasury gave the Bureau of Engraving and Printing the task of designing and printing the new currency.

Claude M. Johnson, then Chief of the BEP, had definite ideas about the role of art in paper money. By 1893 Johnson and the BEP had decided on four artists – the muralists Edwin H. Blashfield, Will H. Low, C. S. Reinhart and Walter Shirlaw – to design the new currency, and planned to award a commission of $800 for each design the BEP accepted.

1896 $1 USD Note

The noted artists, together with the BEP’s talented engravers, created a new currency of unparalleled beauty – extraordinary designs, the likes of which had never been seen before in the U.S. and have never been equalled since.

Will H. Low’s design for the $1 note

Will H. Low’s design for the $1 note, entitled History Instructing Youth, shows a female History with a young student standing beside her, gesturing to an open book of history before her. An olive branch rests against the book, holding it open to show the Constitution of the United States upon the page. Both the Washington Memorial and the Capitol Dome can be seen in the background landscape. The outside border of the note shows 23 wreaths, each bearing the name of a noteworthy American – not surprisingly starting with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but also including such names as poet Henry Longfellow, inventor Robert Fulton, and author Nathaniel Hawthorne, among many others. The seal of the Treasury appears in the lower right.

Low’s original painting, which now hangs in the BEP’s Washington, D.C. offices, was slowly and artfully reproduced as an intaglio printing plate by the BEP’s talented engraving staff.

Shortly after the $1 bill was released to the public, Bureau engraver G.F.C. Smillie was informed by a friend that the word tranquillity was misspelled in the tiny Constitution that adorned the book. “Rats,” Smillie reportedly replied. “The word was spelled that way in the original Constitution…”

Smillie was, of course, correct… even though, at the time, tranquillity (with two “l”s) was the accepted spelling.

“Now at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing we must ‘follow copy,’” a Bureau spokesman later stated, “and cannot demonstrate superior knowledge in the face of absolute authority. Hence, ‘tranquility’ is on the new note. There is plenty of authority for spelling that word economically in respect to ‘l’s.”

1896 $1 USD Currency Note

The $1 note was released to the public on July 14, 1896, the first of the series to be put into circulation. Because of the public’s unfamiliarity with the new money, though, some people began illegally “raising” the values of the bills by changing the numbers in the corners and then passing the notes off as “the new $5s” or “the new $10s”.

The memory of this may be why the present-day U.S. Treasury chose to release the highest denominations of our new currency first, and then slowly proceeded downwards as people grew accustomed to the new designs. (It would make little sense for a counterfeiter to take a new $100 bill and try to persuade people it was a new style of $1.)

The back of the 1896 $1, featuring intricate geometric lathe work and a winged, shield-bearing Liberty in each of the upper corners, carries traditionally-styled portraits of both George and Martha Washington. The portraits were engraved by Alfred Sealey and Charles Burt, respectively, and the overall design of the back was the work of Thomas F. Morris.

Recently made the Chief of the BEP’s engraving division, Morris had his own concerns about the 1896 note designs. They were the only notes since 1861 which had no geometric lathe designs on the face of the notes, and the intricate lathe-work served as a strong deterrent to counterfeiters. Perhaps this accounts for the unusually intricate and thorough lathe-work which Morris applied to the backs of the 1896 designs.

People being what they are, there were several public statements that the central “One” on the note was irresponsible. The reasoning was thus: “no one should come between George and Martha Washington”.

Don’t blame me. I don’t make the news. I only report it.

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