As you high school juniors prepare to go off to college after next year, decide which story you want written about how you handled your finances as a young adult.
Many young people graduate from college not only with historically high student loan debt, but also with thousands of dollars of credit card debt at very high rates of interest.
Too often, graduates don’t land that big job they counted on. So the burden of their debt, which they now have to repay in addition to their ongoing living expenses, leaves them struggling in ways that come as a real shock after living a pretty nice lifestyle through credit cards in college.
I wouldn’t want that to be my story.
Then there are the students who have to file for bankruptcy. And the students who handled their credit card debt so poorly and destroyed their credit by paying late, missing payments or exceeding their credit limits, that they lost out on jobs, apartments, car loans and student loans.
Who would want to be the subject of those stories? There are other stories, though, too. Much nicer ones. Stories of college students who stick to realistic budgets in college. Who know the difference between needs and wants, live within their means and work hard to minimize their debt. Students who work the highest-paying jobs they can find through college, use cash instead of plastic and always look for ways to save money.
Those stories would be my choice. Here’s how to make it yours, too.
• Ignore credit offers. When you get to college, you will be aggressively solicited by salespeople, e-mail and fliers to sign up for credit cards. You’ll be offered attractive free gifts, sometimes even iPods. You’ll be amazed at the credit limits you’ll be offered. But don’t get a credit card until at least senior year of college.
They want you to have those cards not because they think you will be financially responsible but because they hope you’ll use them irresponsibly and end up paying them a lot of interest and hidden fees.
|
NextStepU