For those who think about their financial situation, read this account. It begins:

Driving home from the bar one evening, my friend Marilyn confided in me that she was afraid. In six months, she would be graduating from grad school and her parents were going to cut her off financially for the first time in 26 years. Marilyn works twice a week (8 hours total) waiting tables to pay for pot and shoes, but everything else from her rent to her groceries has been paid for by her parents. Marilyn, at 26, doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook and has no idea what a gallon of milk costs. On top of that, she managed to secretly charge up some credit cards to the tune of $12,000 and that debt alone was overwhelming her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like when she had to pay all of her own bills, plus the credit card debt. She fucked up big time and rather than admit that to her parents (who amassed their wealth through careful, responsible investments) she was desperately confiding in her older friend hoping for a magic solution to her problems.

I suppose she came to me because I’ve been there. If any of you consider me obnoxious and self important now, you should have known me when I was in high school. At that time, I hadn’t ever had to struggle for anything in my life. Everything from material things to academic achievements were mine without the slightest bit of work or effort on my part. So when I sat in my high school physics class and the theories being taught did not instantly become clear to me, I turned up my little nose, crossed my arms, and refused to learn the material at all because it was obviously beneath me. Physics was beneath me. This was my response to a challenge that required more than a few seconds to accomplish.

This was also my mentality when I began college. Unlike Marilyn, my parents cut me off financially the day I graduated high school, but that didn’t matter because I was able to maintain my style of living through credit cards. I applied for 11 of them and used them to purchase things like lattes, kegs of beer, and plastic Jerry Garcia bear beads to decorate my apartment. I thought credit cards were free money and in six months, I had maxed out every one. I would have gotten more, too, if my credit at that point wasn’t in the shitter. But it didn’t matter because I really had everything I needed at that point. …

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