Now I know

I'm not sure if my parents really had a plan when they had me. I'm also not sure if I was exactly planned. Not that I doubt that my parents love each other or me, I just wonder how things got to where they are now. We do pretty okay, but considering how much success my mom had in her old job as a teacher I think, "Why didn't we save more?"

My mom was a young, Mexican-American woman when she went to college in the 70's for her teaching degree. She got grants and scholarships since women like her were few and far between at that time. These days, being a Mexican-American girl with a B-average you're not going to find many people wanting to give you free money in this state unless you're going to be a damn engineer. My parents were counting on me to have college taken care of with free money. That's not how it worked out. I haven't taken out an ass-load of loans, but I would have liked to not taken out ANY. I worry all the time how I'm going to pay back that debt.

My parents didn't start a college fund for me. I don't exactly resent them for it, I just wish they had. I wish they would have saved for a lot of things. One thing I'm adamant about is starting a college fund for my non-existant children. I don't want them to struggle with money when they should just worry about getting their degree and being a college kid, if that's what they want to do.

I worry about how I'm going to pay for ANYTHING when I'm older... which is why the second I got a job, I opened a savings account. I started a very tiny nest egg. Right now the money is for school next semester and possibly for a down payment on an apartment. I want to plan for everything, which is something I doubt my parents did much of.  Perhaps they did have a plan but they didn't plan incase that plan didn't work out. We've seemed to struggle a bit with money ever since my dad's recording studio went under, something neither he or my parents' credit ever recovered from.

Credit cards, to me, are the craziest thing. Up until maybe five/six  years ago I didn't understand how they or loans worked. The idea of buying something with fake money, then pay it back over a period of time totally didn't register with me. I thought, "Why buy something if you can't afford to pay for all of it?" I can understand how this is helpful when buying a car or a house, but pretty much everything else I think should be bought if you have the funds for it. Financing a laptop? Sorry, but that sounds pretty silly to me. You finance a Ducati, not a Dell.

I plan on saving and investing for my retirement soon. Sounds like a really stupid, hopeful thing to do at 21 but holy shit, have you seen the economic state we're in? There's a good chance that no one, not my job, or the company I work for will take care of that for me so I have to plan my own retirement. A lot of this thinking has been with me for awhile but my economics class is really egging me on to get it done. I may not have a real good idea of what I want to do with my life, but I know I want to be somewhat well off and responsible with my money when I get there.

~C.M. xx

Four star daydream

Seems like my life is always in some kind of tiny crisis. The latest one involves employment. Remember that new girl that started at my job a couple of weeks ago? Yeah, well something came up in her record or something so she's been let go. The girl was kind of a ditz though, to be honest. Nice, but a little ditzy. Apparently she did pretty well at work with the little (but important) tasks, aside from accidentally selling a policy to herself. Anyway, the point is, I'm still the only bilingual person at work and totally not getting paid for it. It's not so much about the money, while would be nice to have some more cash, it's more about feeling like my time there is worth it. Yeah, I get paid SOME commission but I hate working on commission. It's a bit more stressful than I'd like considering I get paid less than a cashier at Walmart.

So, I wanted to quit my job pretty soon because I'm feeling burntout and trapped. I tell my mom about my plan and she was mostly okay with it. Then I told my dad... welp, he didn't like the idea too much. He wants me to have a job before I quit the one I have now, which I agree would be the best thing to do but I'm a weakling, I'm tired all the time, and my immunity has gone to shit since working at Insurance Place. I'm DONE. If I wait to get a new job then I could be at Insurance Place for another five months, or longer. Plus, it's hard to set-up job interviews when I'm unavailable 60% of the hours in the week. So, I was feeling pretty hopeless but then my mom... My awesome, genius of a mom suggested I apply to be a substitute teacher as a back up. If they hire me and set me up to have orientation in January I can go ahead and quit, exhaust my time with school and looking for a new job but if nothing comes up I can still count on the substituting job. I'm not ecstatic about it, considering I'm not sure how qualified I am to substitute but I'm glad that a plan has been set forth!

I guess I'm feeling a little more driven lately. I'm just not happy with my lack of results so all I can do is work harder to get what I want, which in the short run is a better job and possibly a new place to live. Still trying to figure that second one out. I could be stuck living with some relatives, while are caring and generous, are also overbearing, pushy and have very different political/religious views as me. I can only keep my mouth shut for so long. I need more freedom, not less of it.

Sorry to go on ranting about. I know most of you probably don't care about this, but I suppose I just needed to see it typed out. I'll probably be bitching about money and my relationship with it pretty soon.

Stay excellent,

~C.M. xx