Robin Beck looks back on her college years with a mixture of pride and regret.
“ what am doing about college is that I was able to walk away with it with a degree and go find a job, um, but what I regret most is , you know, getting a credit card, wracking it up , and getting multiple credit cards and doing the same thing, because I have to deal with it right now, I am paying it off now it is kind of worth to do it.”
Robin graduated with a degree in fine arts and nearly seven thousand dollars in high interest credit card debt, paying off those cards costs her nearly twenty percent of her take-home salary every month.
“Things that I charged on my credit card in college were, you know, those spring-break vocations, um, going out to eat with friends, you know, numerous times. Other things were like materialistic like clothes, accessories, make-up, all that trying to keep up with everyone else. I wish I could do those things now you know, now I can’t have those things, I have to do with, you know, what I have got, you know, wait until my shoes are falling apart and work and buy new ones, I just I can’t enjoy the things that I enjoyed in college because I enjoyed them in college. I guess when I was making the purchases in college with my credit card saying: oh, I can just pay that off later. You know, I am, I figured out been making more money than what I was giving out to financial aid and to my parents, and in reality you’re not, I mean you have to compensate for other things like tax been taking out of your salary, um, groceries, gas is something I didn’t even thing about because my parents always paid it. I mean all those little things they will add a….”
Robin is not alone, twenty one percent of college student graduate with seven thousand dollars in credit card debt, credit cards are easy to get, eighty three percent of college students have at least one, and many students turn to credit cards to finance their wants, like clothes, entertainment and trips.
Let’s say you have a two thousand dollar credit card, if you just pay the minimum amount each month it’s going to take about eight years to pay off that debt. A better plan would be to get a part-time job to pay for the things that you want and a low-interest education model would help you cover the costs of tuition, books and housing.
It’s a financial lesson Robin said she never got in college. But one she is learning, now that she is paying her own bills.
“ I heard this phrase, you know, if you live like a professional while in college you’ll live like a student when you get out. ‘Cos I did live like a professional? Now that I vented the experience I’ve noticed I lived extravagant lifestyle in college when I should be living it now when I have a job and….I think of it this way I could be making a car payment for what I am paying for in credit cards”
