Note: This was once part of one giant post but I have decided to break it up into smaller parts, so that the post isn't that long to read.
Last time I wrote about by Post Graduation Blues. This post is really the introduction for the reason behind this blog. Money Troubles. I have money troubles, there I said it. I know it's not something special. many people have money problems, if you are reading this then you probably have money problems. Join the club.
2) Money Troubles
This is really the source for all my woes, just like most humans, I have money troubles. You see I am not that bad of a spender. I mean I have my times were I can unnecessarily impulse buying. But I understand the idea of restraint. I have had a total of 4.51/2 (two jobs were held at the same time but for one semester) in my life. Last year about this time, I had high hopes of building a savings fund and meeting a lot of personal goals. I had a nice solid budget and I never overdrawn my bank account. So what happened? My family happened. My inability to say no to them happened. And poor planning on my part happened. So now, I have $29 dollars in cash and $22 and some change in the bank. I have close to twenty thousand dollars in student loans, no job and my credit score is poor. In my life, I have had two credit cards. I got them my first year in college, they were like heaven sent when my mom drove up to the campus to drop them off. At the time, I was in a very expensive major, Interior Architecture. They expected us to pay for a lot of things without having a job, (one professor actually suggest I quit my job when I told him I was having a hard time keeping up with all the insignificant projects). I couldn’t depend on my parents for financial support they were barely making ends-meet. Citibank had given me two $800 dollar credit cards. I allowed my mom to keep one and I kept the other. Within the first couple of months, most of the $800 dollars were spent, some on school items and others on frivolous things. I started making the minimum payments on my card through the internet and never missed a payment. However, my mother was not as diligent as I was, and had not told me that she had maxed-it out and had not paid a dime to the balance. The company had not informed me of this but had been calling home, and my mom is in the group that ignores phone calls from bill collectors.
That summer I went to visit family upstate and ask my sister if she could continue to make the payments for the two months I would be away, $20 a month wasn’t much. Well somehow, she forgot even though I reminded her on several occasion. So I entered my sophomore year with bad credit. I asked my mom what I should I do she said not to worry about it. It was then that I realized I didn’t know much about credit and money, a friend of mine and went through something similar where she was behind on her payments, she told me she made a call to the company and they were willing to let her make smaller payments until she could catch back up. If I had only knew that then. Well within that year I let my family talk me into getting a cell phone, well when I found out they were unjustly charging me for items I never agreed to put on my account, I refused to pay them thus another hit to my credit score. After that I got smart and no longer took my finances for granted, I started saving and budgeting. I got out of the expensive major and was very positive about my future. So what happened? Yet again my family, my sister moved into her own apartment, but she posed to me that it would be our apartment, my mom’s car got reposed so she used my name to get a new one. Well my sister used me for a second paycheck (causing me to go overdrawn every single month) and kicked me out, my mismanages her money and now she’s two payments late. I get phone calls from them almost every day.
Vactioning From the Edge: Introductions part 3 - My Family
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