Counting My Pennies » education

Oh no!

Megan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:00:08 +0000

Today, I got this e-mail from a friend.

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes.We came down here to England for a short vacation and i was mugged at gun point last night,at the park of the hotel where we lodged.All cash,creditcards and cell were stolen off me.Thank God we have our life and passport.

I’ve been to the embassy and the Police here are not helping issues at all.They asked us to wait for 3weeks but we can’t wait till then. Our flight leaves in less than 3hrs from now and we are having problems settling the hotel bills.

The hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the hotel bills.
you can speak with him through this number +447024086282 OR +447011138267. We are freaked out at the moment.

you can wire the money to me through westernunion all you need is Name
on my passport and location below.

Name:
Location:105 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4HQ, United Kingdom
Amount: $1,550

I’ll def refund your cash as soon as i get home.

My poor friend! All alone in England with no money!

Oh wait. Yep, that’s right, scam. Someone hacked his e-mail account and sent this to everyone in his address book. Of course, Gmail adds everyone you ever e-mail to your address book, so hundreds and hundreds of people got this message. Having heard about this scam, I recognized this immediately, even before reading the e-mail and realizing this is nothing like how my friend speaks. (Plus he’s unemployed, so I’m pretty sure he’s not on holiday in England.)

So as always, be on your toes for scams, but more importantly, remind your not so tech savvy friends and family about this sort of scam. I can see a lot of well-meaning older relatives falling for this sort of thing.

And remember, change your passwords often!

Choosing a Path

Megan — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:18:21 +0000

Graduation season is upon us again. College graduates are making their way into the working world (or trying to, at least). High school students are heading off to college (or into the workforce). It’s a scary time to be in either of those positions. It used to be that you would finish college and have a job already waiting for you. Now recent grads are working part-time jobs while job hunting for months or even years. High schoolers look at that group and wonder what they should major in to have the best chance at a job when they finish school.

When I went to college, I was told to major in what I loved. So I did. I’m the proud owner of a B.A. in English. Useful, right? We used to joke that if you study engineering, you become an engineer. If you study accounting, you become an accountant. If you study English, you become a… There’s just no easy answer. Of course, I had a useful supplementary major, and I ultimately went to grad school for a law degree, which is useful. And my writing skills have definitely come in handy both during grad school and in my career. But it wasn’t easy finding a job after college, and I can’t imagine what that’s like now.

I think the ideal situation is when you can study something you love while also studying something that will make you marketable. For some people, it’s easy. I had a friend who loved biology. She’s a very successful researcher now. Another friend loved programming and he works for a big technology firm. Other people had to work a little harder to combine their loves, but came out with dual degrees. Sure, it took more time, but the friend with the degrees in mechanical engineering and theater enjoyed his time at school and has a great job now (and still does theater on the side).

The one thing you shouldn’t do is stick to a path you hate. A good friend went through college as a pre-med major. She didn’t love it, but figured that she just hated the classes and that medical school would be better. After a bit of bad luck that turned out to be good luck, she got fairly sick and had to postpone taking her MCATs. She ultimately ended up changing her mind about medical school all together. She’s now a successful lawyer and very happy. I don’t think she knew what she wanted to do while she was in college. Medicine wasn’t right for her, but it was what she had always thought she wanted to do, so she felt she had to stick it out.

That’s not to say that if you’re not doing well, you should give up. The question is if the struggle is worth it. And remember, it’s not about the money. Sure, a great paycheck is awesome. But you have to remember that you will end up working 40+ hours a week. If you despise what you’re doing, that’s going to make things pretty miserable. Of course, you can always change your mind later. I went to law school with a number of people in their 40′s and 50′s, people who decided to make a career change. But if you know you hate it while you’re still in school, maybe you should do a bit of soul searching and decide if this really is the direction you want to go. And remember – money isn’t everything.

A bit of different advice for graduates

Megan — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:00:40 +0000

It’s graduation season once again. I know a number of people graduating this year from both college and graduate school. Some have jobs, some don’t. Most are glad to be done with school, though the idea that graduation means that you have to think about being a grown-up is weighing heavily on their minds.

I was discussing this yesterday with a co-worker. When I graduated from college, I didn’t have a job, but I had a line on a job. I graduated on a Sunday, interviewed on Tuesday and got an offer that afternoon. I then went on a family vacation for a week, came back, took the LSAT, and started my job. I worked a little over a year, quit at the end of July, and started law school mid-August. I worked every summer (and during the school year as well), graduated from law school and had a whole weekend off before starting law review classes. Took the bar exam, came home, spent a week recovering, started packing, went to a friend’s wedding in Canada, came back, went to a college football game, and then moved to D.C., where I started my job not two weeks later.

As you can see, I never took any time off for myself. My sister’s roommate is planning a trip for this summer where she and a friend road-trip across the country. Another friend is planning to backpack through Europe for a month. I’m a little jealous of these people. I’m at a point in my life where unless I quit my job, there probably aren’t going to be any opportunities to take a month or two and just travel or enjoy life. At least not until retirement. Or until I win the lottery.

So I have some non-traditional advice for graduates. Take time off.

Now, I know that seems strange in a blog dedicated to personal finance. After all, graduates have debts to pay. They have to start work, or they have to work on finding a job. And all of this is true. By not taking time off, I had that much more money saved up when I started law school. And sure, it did make a difference. But I do regret never doing anything crazy and going off and just having fun before delving in to real life.

While a trip to Europe might be out of your price range, what about a road trip? Get a friend or two together and you can split the costs. Get a tent and stay at campsites. Have fun and be ridiculous.

Or better yet, take some time and do something good for others. Take a roadtrip and dedicate it to service. See if you can drive around the country and work at various Habitat for Humanity houses. Or other sorts of charities. In addition to having fun, that’s not a bad thing to put on your resume. I don’t think any potential employer would see that you spent a summer doing charity work and use that against you. Also, if you’re still looking for a job, maybe you can do phone interviews while you’re off in another state volunteering. Again, it might look good to an employer, and you would still get to experience some freedom.

All right, so maybe it’s not the best advice. Finding a job is important, and working to pay off your debts and start saving for the future is also important. But I think it’s important to also remember to live for today every so often and enjoy life. You can always be a grownup tomorrow. You’ve worked hard. Reward yourself, even if it’s just for a week or two.

Paying for College

Megan — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:00:21 +0000

I asked a friend for a blog post idea, and she suggested I write about funding your child’s college education – do I feel that we “owe” our children an education and is it financially responsible to save for your child’s college costs at the expense of your retirement account.

I was blessed to have family members help out with my undergraduate education at a time when there was no such thing as online colleges. I know that’s a rarity, and I know how lucky I am for it. It was part of the reason that I could afford to look into law school. I think I may have taken it for granted at first, but after realizing the debt my friends were incurring, I realized just how lucky I was to be in my situation.

Because of that, I do feel that I owe a college education to my children (or at least education assistance), but it’s not something I owe to my (hypothetical) children. It’s more that I feel that I owe it to those generous family members to pay it forward.

Of course, doing the math, this is easier said than done. I played around with some tuition calculators, and to give one child the same college education I had (undergraduate, not grad school) in 20 years may cost over $120,000 per year. I can’t even comprehend that. And that’s just for one kid. Ouch.

I know that there’s an argument that children learn more from having to pay for their own education. They are more cautious about choosing where to go, and they better learn to manage their money. That may be true, but I would like to be able to give my kids at least a little boost to help them out. I learned to manage money, though going to grad school and figuring out how to pay for that may have played a part. Either way, I think I can try to teach my children about money in other ways.

Of course, I absolutely don’t feel that I should pay for an education for my children at the expense of my retirement accounts. I would be doing a disservice to my kids in that instance. The last thing I want to do is have to rely on them to take care of me in my old age because I can’t afford it.

A friend of mine is currently dealing with this. His parents spent a lot of money while their kids were young in order to give the kids a good life and good grade school and high school education (they all funded their own college educations in various ways). Now his parents are struggling to make ends meet, and while he is in a position to help them out with a few hundred bucks each month, they refuse to take it, because they don’t want to take money from their kids. He hates to see them like this and knows that it’s inevitable that they’re going to end up needing their help in a big way. I don’t ever want to put my children through that.

So that’s where I stand. I’m sure others have a different view – I know that my desire to pay forward the generosity I received is the biggest reason why I want to be able to pay as much as I can for my children’s education. Where do you stand? Do you plan to/want to help your kids out?

The “Plight” of the Twenty-Somethings

Megan — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:00:04 +0000

A recent article on Slate.com discussed how twenty-somethings are dealing with the recession. I particularly like the title: “The Real World Threw Up All Over Us.” The article does, at times, seem a bit whiny on the part of the twenty-somethings interviewed, but the author is careful to say that the e-mails she received were anything but whiny. They just showed how uncertain people are feeling.

I think a lot of us understand. As the article points out, we “set up [our] lives based on assumptions that suddenly no longer apply.” And we don’t know what the new rules are. A lot of us grew up with the belief that we should go to college, get a good education, and if we worked hard, we would get good jobs and by our late twenties, be buying homes and starting families. And while that still occurs, I think everyone feels a bit more economic pressure.

One big problem, I think, is student loans. I was always encouraged to aim high and to get the best education possible. At eighteen, do you really understand what student loans mean? Sure, I was a very smart eighteen-year-old, but I don’t know that I could conceptualize the idea of paying off loans for twenty years or more. I just wanted to go to a good school where I could get a good education and have a great time doing it. Plus there’s always the underlying belief that if you do well enough, you’ll get a great job and pay off those loans in no time flat.

Clearly, that’s not what’s happening. And student loans are nothing new. My mom still talks about the payment book from my dad’s college tuition and how she wrote that check every month for years until the loans were paid off. But even with inflation, he wasn’t faced with the numbers that students are faced with today.

Sure, some of that is their fault. Before law school, I distinctly remember a lawyer I worked with telling me “Be sure to take out extra loan money so you can go on a sweet Spring Break trip. You can just pay it off later. It’s totally worth it.” I didn’t listen to that particular advice, and I can’t say that I regret that.

Given my recent work highs and lows, one quote in the article really rang true for me. A woman taked about waiting for a promised promotion and not wanting to ask for more and be more vulnerable to a layoff, yet having always thought of herself as someone who would value her worth and demand fair pay. It’s definitely a struggle. No one wants to be undervalued at work, especially when others around you are compensated higher than you for equal work. But sometimes, being the lower paid employee doing excellent work makes your position safer in the company.

At the same time, there are some positives. The article speaks of learning to live more simply. While it may seem tough to not have a lot of disposable income, if you can learn to live on less and be happy, then when you do find yourself making more money, maybe you won’t feel the need to go spend it immediately. You’ll learn to save and spend your money on what’s most important. My grandparents still live a very simple day-to-day life, doing everything they can to save a few pennies (rinsing foil and plastic bags, wearing clothing til it literally falls apart, then repairing it), but they’re financially very well off, probably due to this way of life. Not that they’re cheapskates. As I’ve discussed here before, they go on nice vacations and go out to dinner and to the theater where they splurge on the good seats. But that’s what’s important to them.

I wonder if perhaps this struggle is a good thing. I’m on the cusp between Generation X and Generation Y, but the general impression is that people currently in their twenties were all born with silver spoons in their mouths, even if our parents couldn’t necessarily afford it. We never had to struggle for much of anything. I went to a presentation by a eighty-something feminist historian who commented that young people, people under twenty-five (she looked very pointedly at me, though I passed that mark years ago), don’t know what it means to struggle. They have been given everything they have ever wanted and they are weak because they don’t know what it’s like to have to fight to get what you want. While I think that’s an overgeneralization, the idea that having to struggle and work for something makes you stronger and makes you value it even more. So perhaps the good part to this economic struggle is that it reminds us that life isn’t always easy and can’t be planned, but hard work and determination pay off in the end. And that building a substantial savings account feels pretty darn good.

Think before you apply

Megan — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:00:58 +0000

My sister graduates from college this year. For a while, she’s been planning to finish her business degree and then go back to school for a nursing degree. She decided too late in her college career to easily switch over, and her university doesn’t offer a nursing degree, so it made the most sense finish the degree she’s working on and then go back for nursing. There are a few programs out there for students who already have a bachelor’s degree, so that’s her goal. She’s going to move back home, work part-time, and go to school. It’s a good plan that everyone’s happy with.

But I digress.

While talking to her, I learned that a number of her friends are also planning to continue their education after graduation, most in the form of some sort of graduate school. I told her I was a little surprised at that, but it turns out that most of her friends realized they couldn’t find a job, so they just decided to get graduate degrees.

I can’t say I think this is a good idea. If you are sure that you want to get an MBA or be a lawyer or a doctor, then sure. Go to graduate school. You’ll come out with lots of loans, but you’ll have the degree you wanted and hopefully be able to find the job you want. But going to graduate school just because you can’t find a job now and hey, law school seems fun is a bad plan (Note: law school is not fun. I learned a lot and enjoyed the subject matter, but I wouldn’t call it “fun.” Or easy.)

For one thing, there’s no guarantee that there will be jobs in one or two or three years when the student finally finishes their graduate degree. Again, if it’s what you want to do, that’s another story. Then there are student loans to think about. I had a classmate in law school who had no desire to be a lawyer, but he got a full scholarship from the school, so he decided to give it a shot. He dropped out sometime during our first year, and all that scholarship money went to waste, when it could have gone to a student who truly did want to study the law. Most of my friends graduated with over $100k in student loan debt, many of them with over $200k in student loan debt. It takes a long time to pay off $200k. Unfortunately, many of my friends, who are now second year associates in law firms, have been downsized. It’s especially hard to pay off $200k when you’re working part-time at a bookstore. Again, the economy will pick up, and for most people, they want to be lawyers, so they’re volunteering with pro bono legal services to keep their skills up and really enjoying the opportunity.

My roommate is currently a student, and while I’m not sure of her loan numbers, she commented that if she pays $600 a month in loan payments, she might be able to pay off the loans in 10 years. There is a myth that people with graduate degrees will easily be able to pay $600 in loan payments. Not when you work for the government like I do and like she hopes to. It’s doable, but it’s not fun.

The point of this rambling entry is to say that I think graduate degrees are great, if you want to get a graduate degree. Beachgirl recently started law school (and I still cringe when I see “Civil Procedure” on her to-do list), and she really put thought into it before she decided to go. I’m sure things will work out for her, because she knew what she was getting herself into. I just wonder if all these young 20-somethings just finishing school are in the same boat.

Studying what you love

Megan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Growing up, my parents always told me this: “We don’t care what you decide you want to be, but you have to go to college. If you want to herd sheep, well, then you will be a college educated shepherd.”

(My standard response was that I wanted to be a ninja. To this day, I still think it would be a fun profession.)

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life when I went to college. I liked my literature classes in high school, and I loved music, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a music teacher. An English teacher didn’t sound so bad though. So I entered college as an English major, planning on entering the education program my second year.

One semester in the education program told me that while I might still want to be a teacher, I did not want to go through the education program offered to me. I was, for the most part, enjoying my English classes, so I decided to continue there. I changed direction a bit and picked up a supplementary major in a computer field, intending to go to a consulting firm like Arthur Anderson.

Well, we all know what happened there.

So I was coming up on graduation. I looked at what I liked to do. I loved my literature classes. I loved to read and analyze and write. And I liked history and government. A light bulb appeared above my head, and I decided to go to law school. So that I wasn’t just jumping into graduate school without any idea of what I was doing, I took a year and worked in a law firm. I learned that while I did not so much enjoy toxic tort litigation, I liked the law. So off to law school it was.

I sometimes wonder what I was thinking, majoring in English. I did what everyone said – I majored in what I loved. Our running joke used to be “If you study engineering, you become an Engineer. If you study architecture, you become an architect. What are you if you study English? Unemployed.” Things worked out for me though. I enjoyed what I learned in school, and I enjoy what I do now. My fellow English majors ended up in all sorts of professions: education, theater, government, journalism, and many others.

Sure, with the exception of my supplemental major, I really graduated with no marketable skills. I could read, analyze, and write, but I feel those skills are grossly undervalued by business. But I had followed my passion, and even though my career has taken a total left turn from where I thought I was going when I was 18 and entering college, I have no regrets. I still think that majoring in what you love is a valuable recommendation. You just need to also think about what you will do with your education when you finish, and maybe that means picking up a second major (I have a number of friends who were business and anthropology double majors, for example), or maybe that means graduate school. But you shouldn’t abandon what you love. You should work to turn that into what you will do with your life after graduation.