RANDOM THOUGHTS #208

Steve Cole's advice to young people graduating from college and starting their adult lives. He wishes you could just go buy a book called Being a Grown-up for Dummies but apparently there is no such book. There are, however, no end of websites on that theme, so Google them and read. In the meantime, here is his version.
    

1. First, congratulations. College is tough and graduating is an accomplishment. Just remember that your degree is not a certificate of entitlement. The world doesn't owe you an income or even a job. You have to get out there and find a job and earn an income. Remember that everything you did, and everything you're about to do, was already done by almost every adult you know, so welcome to the club, but you're not unique.
    

2. Second, my condolences that you have graduated into the worst economy since the Great Depression, with the worst job market. Even better, the valuable degree you spent a ton of student loan money buying isn't going to get you the kind of high-paying job that your professors predicted when they signed you up for those student loans. You're going to be lucky to find a job at all. Except in a very few narrow fields, you're likely to be making less than half what you thought you were going to be making. You may well be working two or three part-time jobs to assemble a full-time income, and that means your jobs won't come with many benefits. Lots of you may be making minimum wage even if you're sitting at a computer doing fairly technical work.
   

3. Take stock of what you have and what you have already done. You probably have a bank account, credit card, and credit history. (You want to get your free annual report from one of the three bureaus right away to see if you have debts you have forgotten or if someone has stolen your identity. If the website wants a credit card number, you're not on the real free report website, which is annualcreditreport.com and not the paid ads on Google. Each of the three bureaus has to give you a free report once a year, so rotate them and get one bureau every four months. Sign up for a credit monitoring service, which costs $10 a month.) You may also have credit card balances you haven't paid, and student loan debt that you're about to start paying. Figure out what those payments are going to be and plan to pay off that debt.
    

4. It is entirely possible that you won't find a job "in your chosen field" but that does not mean you get to relax around the pool waiting for the perfect job to call. It's okay to take a month and seriously look for the job you really want, but you need to get to work earning money, even if the only job you can get is working in a restaurant. On your resume, the fact that you went to work looks good; the fact that you waited around for a job in your field makes you look like a whiny little brat who thinks the world owes him a career. Nobody wants to  hire that kind of person.
    

5. Start working up a written budget, writing down how much your new job pays (not how much your professor said a job would pay), what bills you need to pay (and what debts you need to pay off), and what you spend just to stay alive. (Get a notebook and during a whole month write down every dollar you spend. Categorize this as food, gasoline, rent plus utilities, and other. Then write a budget, including money going into your reserve fund and a slush fund you can use to reinforce any of the other categories.) Talk with your parents about what bills they have been paying for you for the last twenty-odd years and when they expect you to start paying them for yourself. If possible, get them to agree to wait a couple of months so you can build up a little bit of cash reserve for an emergency fund. You may also want to build up a car down payment and/or an apartment deposit. You do not want to go buy a new car and sign up for an apartment lease until you actually have a full-time job (and the confidence that you and the job will be there for a while). You may have to re-scale your expectations once you find out how much money you will actually make.
    

6. I mentioned an emergency fund, and I was serious. You need at least enough cash to cover the deductible on your car insurance, and preferably $1,000. Lots and lots of emergencies turn into annoyances if you have the cash to deal with them. Remember that an emergency is a problem you cannot predict. Christmas spending, vacations, weddings, and other such things are predictable therefore you cannot use the emergency fund for them. You have to save and budget for them. (Please don't get into the habit of borrowing a lot of money for things.) If you use the emergency fund, you need to refill it as fast as you can.
    

7. If you're going to stay living at home for awhile, you need to pay rent to your parents, even if it's just a token amount like $100 a month. You need to show them that you understand what being a grownup means in dollars and common sense, and you need to get into the habit of paying for your own upkeep. Your paycheck is not all "fun money" for parties and buying junk you don't really need.
    

8. If you got out of college with a lot of debt, you need a plan to pay it off, and that's going to mean living as simply and cheaply as possible so that every dollar can go to pay the debt. A new car and an apartment may have to wait until you get that debt paid off.
    

9. If you're in a career field where you can make money on the side, start up your own side business and pursue it (when not at your real job) to make extra income and establish contacts. Depending on your field, your side business may be the only work you do in your chosen field while your real "pay the bills" job is in some other field.
    

10. Lots of people marry their college sweethearts soon after graduation. If that's you, congratulations! Just remember that no matter how much you spend on your wedding, the next day you are exactly the same amount of married. You can have a perfectly nice wedding with cake and punch for a hundred guests at the family church or your mother's back yard for $5,000 if you plan carefully and shop around. Maybe you should think about saving money for a down payment on a house instead of blowing $20,000 or more for a big party. (Even if it's your parents' money, it's not coming from a bottomless pocket.) Ask yourself if, one year after the wedding, you'd rather be living in a new house or looking at a picture of four white horses pulling you for a 10-minute ride in a carriage? You can spend $500 or $5,000 on a wedding dress and nobody in the audience can tell the difference, but every young lady really should have that moment that she sees herself in a real wedding dress for the first time and knows that it's suddenly all very real.